Altar Music by Christin Lore Weber

Author:Christin Lore Weber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

Suzanne started finding words for the clay in her hands and for the sunset that turned the water of Pelican Lake into a shell pink veil. Her words felt shaped by the spirit of these things. She flung those words out from her like a thread, like the sticky thread a spider makes that waves almost invisible in the air until it catches a branch and holds. And then she spun. She actually imagined herself a spider. In a bush once she had seen a golden spider, sunlight splashing all around her, small legs reaching out to join the fragile tendrils of her silk into her intricate architecture. The creature defied her. She could not have drawn what she saw. No picture could communicate such ethereal quality.

A thought began to form in her mind that she could be what she had seen or held in her hands, and that her words could be a web so nearly invisible that God himself might wander into them and be captured there.

“I do believe you are becoming a poet, Suzanne.” Father Sloan held her sheet of lined notebook paper in his hands. He sat in the black leather wing-backed chair in his rectory living room. She sat across from him in the other chair of the set, the one that had no wings. Despite that, it dwarfed her. She ran her fingers up and down the cracks in the leather of the overstuffed arms where its real color showed through. The living room smelled of pipe tobacco and dust, a warm smell, a safe smell. The priest sat on an island in a sea of books. He had stacked them in piles all around his chair, on his desk, in the corners, under every window, on the dining room table, everywhere. A floor-to-ceiling bookcase covered one whole wall, but it was filled. Books leaned against one another. He’d stacked them and stuffed them into every possible space. He’d ordered books that still occupied their shipping boxes, unopened. She saw religious books—a thing one would expect—but also novels and history and poetry and politics. He owned a great dusty set of the Great Books bound in leather. The poetry of T. S. Eliot and Archibald MacLeish lay open beside his chair.

At noon hour almost every day Suzanne left the school yard and walked the three blocks to the Catholic church. She told no one, and the priest would keep her confidence. She couldn’t tell how old he was, maybe older than her father. His hair was not yet gray, though. He wore glasses with wire rims, and behind them his eyes asked questions that he rarely put into words. He listened to her.

“This is really very good.” He had read her poem again. “Very, very good.”

“It doesn’t rhyme.”

“It doesn’t need to rhyme. It makes a picture. It appeals to the senses. It is delicious on the tongue. It has such fine rhythm—just listen.”

He read it to her. Her heart thumped in her chest when she heard her own words spinning out from the priest’s mouth.

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