The Canadian Short Story by John Metcalf

Author:John Metcalf
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2018-08-01T19:12:04+00:00

“Ecce Cor Meum” is a companion piece to “Still Dark,” the same situation seen from Kelly’s position rather than Simon’s. The story opens thus:

Polyp.

Funny little word. Sounds botanical. A bed of flowering polyps. Gather ye polyps while ye may.

Kelly is sitting in a Starbucks drinking coffee while waiting to have a bone density scan in the medical building she’s just left after blood tests with her own doctor and the speculum insertion that has confirmed a polyp on one side of her cervix.

During the bone density scan, Kelly dozes off to the repetitive Wheenga! Wheenga! as the machine slowly travels up her body; she drifts into an erotic reverie, she and Simon in a car, they are heading for his cottage, she is fondling him as he drives, the wood-smoke smell of his red flannel shirt.

When the machine stops and she is released, she makes her way over to All Saints, where Simon is to conduct the service for Ash Wednesday.

When Kelley’s mind wanders to “Gather ye polyps while ye may,” Miller is using an allusion to a poem again just as she did in the title of her first book, A Litany in Time of Plague. The reference here is to the poem by Robert Herrick “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” which was published in the collection Hesperides in 1648. I quote the first and last verses because, with this allusion, Miller is sounding one of the story’s main emotional themes.

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying;

And this same flower that smiles today

Tomorrow will be dying.

[…]

Then be not coy, but use your time,

And while ye may, go marry;

For having lost but once your prime,

You may forever tarry.

Though Herrick was an ordained priest, he was something of a roisterer, a friend of Ben Jonson and his circle, an ardent royalist in the Civil War losing his benefice during the Commonwealth, and living for some time with a mistress, Tomasin Parsons, who was nearly thirty years younger than he was and with whom he was thought to have had an illegitimate daughter; by “marry” in “To the Virigins,” I rather doubt he meant “marry”; autre temps, autre moeurs.

The story ends with Simon’s Ash Wednesday sermon and with Kelly awaiting his return to the choir loft, where the service has been held, to talk to her after he has finished bidding farewell to the other parishioners.

It is important in understanding the story to know that Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent and always falls forty-six days before Easter, the commemoration of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. (The forty weekdays of Lent are devoted to fasting and penitence in commemoration of Christ’s fasting in the wilderness.) In Roman Catholic churches of the Latin Rite (and High Anglican churches) this service prepares congregations through prayer, repentance, and self-denial to better appreciate Christ’s death and resurrection. Ashes from burned palm crosses of the preceding year’s Palm Sunday are blessed and the officiating priest makes a cross in ash on the foreheads of worshippers.

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