Tea With the Local Saint

            By J.D.
McClatchy

            
               (posted Wednesday,
March 18)
            

            To hear the poet read "Tea
With the Local Saint," click .

            I'd bought a cone of solid
sugar and a boxOf tea for the saint himself, a felt-tip penFor his son, the
saint-elect, and bubblegumFor a confusion of small fry--the five-year-oldAunt,
say, and her seven-year-old nephew.Nothing for the women, of course, the
tattooed,One-eyed, moon-faced matron, or her daughterWhose husband had long ago
run awayAfter killing their newborn by pouringA bottle of cheap cologne down
its throat.This was, after all, our first meeting.

            I was to be introduced by
a Peace Corps palWhose easy, open California waysHad brought a water system to
the villageAnd an up-to-date word to its vocabulary.Every other guttural
spillway of ArabicIncluded a carefully enunciated "awesome,"The speaker
bright-eyed with his own banter.We sat on a pair of Kurt Cobain beach towelsAnd
under a High-Quality Quartz Clock,The plastic butterflies attached to whose
handsSeemed to keep time with those in my stomach.

            At last, he entered the
room, the saint himself,Moulay Madani, in a white head scarf and caftanThe
fading blue of a map's Moroccan coastline,Its hem embroidered with geometric
ports of call.A rugged sixty, with a longshoreman's jaw,A courtier's guile, and
a statesman's earnest pauses,He first explained the crescent dagger he
fingeredHad been made two centuries ago by a clever Jew.Then he squinted for my
reaction. I've no tasteFor bad blood, and gingerly cleared my throat to sayI
was inclined to trust any saint who carried a knife.

            From a copper urn, glasses
of mint tea were poured,Of a tongue-stiffening sweetness. I was allowed to
waveAway the tray of nougat--or rather, the flies on it.Sipping, I waited for a
word, a sign from the saint.I'd wanted to lie, as if underground, and watch Him
dig up the sky, or stand at a riverbankAnd have the water sweep off my
presumptions,Have him blow light into my changeling bones.I wanted to feel the
stalk rise and the blade fall.I wanted my life's arithmetic glazed and fired.I
wanted the hush, the wingstroke, the shudder.

            But sainthood, I learned
soon enough, is a fateWorse than life, nights on call for the demonsIn a
vomiting lamb, a dry breast, a broken radio,And days spent parroting the
timeless adages,Spent arbitrating water rights, property lines,Or feuds between
rival herdsmen over scrub brush,Spent blessing every bride and anyone's
big-belliedFourth or fifth wife, praying that they deliver sons.I thought back
to the time, not ten feet from him,I heard a homily delivered by old John
XXIII,Sounding wholly seraphic in his murmured Italian.

            Ten interpreters stepped
from behind the throne.The English one at last explained the Holy FatherHad
urged us all to wear seatbelts while driving.My heart sank at its plain good
sense, as hymnsEchoed and golden canopies enfolded the pope,How like home it
seemed, with my own fatherA preoccupied patriarch of practicalityWhen what was
wanted veered wildly betweenThe gruff headmaster and the drunken
playwright.Instead, I got the distant advertising salesman,The suburban dad of
what turned out to be my dreams ...

            Dreams that, decades
later, back at my hotel in Fez,A bucket of cold water was suddenly poured
on.I'd gone to the hammam, stripped, and lay on a patternOf sopping tiles that
might have spelled God's will.Steam shrouded the attendant methodically
soapingThe knots of disappointment he'd knuckled in my back.He paused. I
drifted [ The freezing shock. ] I looked upAt a bald, toothless gnome in
swaddling clothesOn his way back to the fountain for more bad news.Something in
his bowlegged walk--perhaps the wearyRoutine of it--made me think of the saint
again,

            Of how, when
tea was done, and everyone had stood,He reached for my head, put his hands over
it,And gently pulled me to his chest, which smelledOf dung smoke and cinnamon
and mutton grease.I could hear his wheezy breathing now, like the prophet's
Last whispered word repeated by the faithful.Then he prayed for what no one had
time to translate--His son interrupted the old man to tell him a groupOf snake
charmers sought his blessing, and a blind thief.The saint pushed me away, took
one long look,Then straightened my collar and nodded me toward the door.