Bible Camp Poem by Robert Dawson

Bible Camp

BIBLE CAMP

1. January, Caracalla's Baths were bare
as grocery crates. The codger
caretaker doused his plate of coals
and dogged us through the dressing stalls.
"Just looking, thank you." We paused
to shuffle silt from a mosaic,
Heliogabalus masking as the Sun.
Hedging the calidarium
with its canvas props for Aida's tomb,
we held hands under the pines of Rome,
pruned almost to mere poles
with cones big as high-volt insulators.
I told you how in California
pines were groomed like crosses
in Bible camps for teenagers.
Remember when I confessed my Lutheran days?
You had to be convinced
With my inscribed Cruden's Concordance …
I rubbed your thumb on my name embossed in gold.

2. At fifteen I was chairman
of my "youth congregation."
Once a year we caravanned in our jalopies
To discuss Christ and teenage petting
at Mount Cross, our chaperoned
redwood retreat.
Out of season, with the run of the camp
to pave a coming convention,
the counselors hiked on midnight bonfire
bull-sessions, blurting
our dreamt abductions into the Second Coming.
We were the doubting
cream of our congregations.

There were no frescoes to justify
Mary's inclusion in the Trinity
on the rain-slopes of Mount Cross …
just fallen rewoods
with a wedge hewed out for pews
and gray Shaker-shingled bunkhouses,
"Paul" for boys, "Dorcas" for girls.
After lights-out,
the dorms would sing hymns to each other.

A standing shaft of bark
hollowed by forest fire before Father Serra's
slipshod trek to Golden Gate,
a living redwood sprouting green from all its boles …
we could see stars four hundred feet up through its crown …
We stood kissing inside the tree.
My fingers on her bare back felt
like dropping icecubes down her blouse.
She was secretary of Oakland's "Sacred Heart."

Nominated president
of the "Sequoia Circuit, "
I couldn't muster prayer enough to defeat myself.
To celebrate, girls from my own church
ransacked my bunk for underwear,
plastering it with toothpaste on my car.

3. Too old to be familial,
the mossy Scandinavians of my church
watched me with runic satisfaction.
In the Weird Books, Odin sings
'Nine nights I hung on the blowing tree,
pricked for doneness by the goat-priest's spear,
offered to Odin, myself to myself.'
That was the kind of Christ I knew God would be.

No trouble believing stories,
I expected faith to increase with works.
When Billy Graham threw down his glove
to the bohemians and luncheon-club queers
of San Francisco, my status made me a councilor.
Thousands tramped down from the bleachers
of the Cow Palace to give themselves to Christ.
"Are you incomplete, " asked Billy, missing the point.
We were using our souls for bait.
The Devil wouldn't take them for a bribe.

4. I am forgetting my miracle of the fishes
performed age ten in our aluminum Spartan trailer,
more a fish tank than a house,
too compact for pets. My father
had fanagled a river yacht
for the weekend from a millionaire
Okie whose Cadillac he'd juiced up.
Snagging every striper stringer in the Delta,
we barged around like a tour bus in a slum.
At home. my three black goldfish
were stewing in fish food
I'd dumped in their built-in bowl,
belly up
in the almost gelatine water
when we teetered in. Father's bare legs
were testing his sheets
while I sloshed fish and all
in the outdoor trailer wash tub
and unscrewed the cold water nozzle.
Squeezing their gills,
I swam them around the tub,
wiping my nose on my shoulder.
"Now's your chance, God, " I thought;
"If they come alive, I'll be a minister."
That was my mother's idea.
The fish mouths gulped
and swam out of their gelid deadness.
Being fish, they didn't warm in my hand.
It was a small miracle,
nothing like forgetting death.

POET'S NOTES ABOUT THE POEM
from SIX MILE CORNER - Houghton Mifflin 1966... Written in 1963 while I was studying with Robert Lowell at Harvard. The influence is obvious.
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