Tanto giú cadde, che tutti argomenti
a la salute sua eran già corti,
fuor che mostrarli le perdute genté.

—Dante, Purgatorio, XXX, 136-138

Our faith must be earned from terror.

—Fred Chappell, Bloodfire, IX

I. FLESH AND SPIRIT

The first two words of the title of this essay are a subdued version of Fred Chappell's more spritely rhymed phrase “attar of matter” (in “Firewood”). I intend, however, the same complementary attachment of terms. Chappell's phrase suggests, in sound as well as substance, that there is an essence embedded in matter and releasable from it, a sweet intangible spirit inexplicably meshed in the molecular arrangement of the elemental stuff of which all things, including human and other creatures, are composed. One direction in which Chappell aims the atomistic possibilities inherent in this perspective is Lucretian. The other primary direction is not, however, subject to the contained reshuffling of atoms. Chappell is more essentially preoccupied with, and hopeful of, images of release and transformation which are Christian in their orientation. The two modes of understanding are, needless to say, not always cleanly separable.

Perhaps a finer distinction is in order. The Lucretian perspective does not employ the complementary duality of flesh and spirit, but rather transposes it into the fluid, imperceptible molecular composition of apparently solid material bodies. This, of course, was Lucretius' understanding of how the transience of individual instances of forms could be reconciled with the equally obvious recurrence, apparently eternal, of the forms themselves. Individual people die, but the human race does not; we eat this carrot today but another grows for us to eat tomorrow; we may pulverize this stone, but stones are everywhere. Mutation and recurrence are complementary motions, rearranging the atoms out of whose coalescence particular things are made, and because of whose dispersal they disappear. But the atoms are irreducible and everlasting, as is the process of rearrangement—carried out by the forces he called Love and Strife—by which perceptible forms occur, pass away, and recur.

The interpenetration of earth, air, fire, and water is one expression of the Lucretian dispensation in Midquest and seems to me in no need of elaborate elucidation. The titles of the frame poems of volumes 2, 3, and 4 serve as sufficient indicators, as do the abundance of phrases in those same poems in which two or more of the elements cohere: “dew-fired,” for instance, and “Earthsmoke,” “earth / with its mouths of wind,” “water in stone,” and “blind windcurrent of the soil.” It shows more explicitly, however, in passages where Chappell uses Lucretius' terms and images. In “Bloodfire Garden,” it is in the fire of love that “we are / whole again, / our atoms driven and / interlocked as heat in air.” When the “untenable trombone tone” Chappell imagines riding “out upon the blue bleached air” pops, it lets him “slide the effervescent atoms” alone (“The Autumn Bleat of the Weathervane Trombone”). In the same poem, he refers to “the hail of impulse nature keeps tossing over / her shoulder.” The recurrent “coming apart to” constructions (as in “fire coming apart now to wind”) extend this explicit evocation across some of the frame poems. In the world beyond the “four-square crucis of elements” in “Earth Emergent Drifts the Fire River” (a cold world of nothingness which I will comment on in more detail later), “the single atoms stray lost and touchless.” This poem is, in fact, dotted with Lucretian infusions, perceptions more accessible because of the atomistic backdrop. As Fred wakes in the first poem of Bloodfire, “The seeds, ignis semina, of fire / Put forth in me their rootlets.” Ignis semina is, in fact, a phrase from Lucretius which Chappell identifies later in “Firewood.”

Because both the author and the narrator of Midquest share the same name but are not identical with one another, I have used “Fred Chappell” or “Chappell” to refer to the former, and “Fred” for the latter. The “Preface” to the volume comments on this distinction.

“Susan Bathing” and “Firewood” comprise the two most probing, subtle, and thorough embodiments of the Lucretian vision in Midquest. They are rather miraculous poems in many ways, not least in their personal and local dimensions, and the careful psychological progression their disguised narrative lines reveal. But my space and context limit me to some brief comments on the process of atomistic transmutations that occur in “Firewood.”

It is “flame, flame” that Fred's ax strikes first; he imagines the fire in the hearth which the log he is splitting will eventually afford. The dimensions the language implies become more complex immediately, as he speaks of the “heart / red in the oak where sun / climbed vein by vein.” It's not until he tangles with the walnut log some seventy-five lines later that these implications begin to receive their fullest development. This time he sees “the life” of the blazing log, “yellow / red and orange and blue & hasting your dark gasses / starward, on the silverblue night splaying a new tree / shape, tree of spirit spread on the night wind.” This new tree lifted from the burning of the old one sifts “upward to the needle pricks of fire” of the constellations. The roots of the tree of fire

                                                  … sizzle in our fireplace, the
ghostly arms of it embrace the moon, the lancet
glance of the star pierces its leafage, this tree
in our fireplace is the sun risen at midnight,
capillaries of heat light lift out the chimney,
the rose trellis of stars is afire, sun reaches
homeward again to the vacant interlunar spaces,
chimney is its shrunk trunk & pins our dwelling
to the earth and to the stars equally, this spirit
trunk in the chimney is the spine of the world. …

Chappell suggests at least a double cycle here: 1) the sun's energy enters the tree, causes it to grow, and then, in the burning of the logs, is released again into the vastness of space where it originated; 2) the physical form of the tree rooted in the earth is released as a tree of spirit rooted in the hearth fire and foliated among the stars. That the stars themselves are fire spreads further the impress of transformation focused in this passage. The fire, however, remains mysterious, no matter the language invented to image it, because it gives us light in which to “read” everything but itself. It is also mortal: as the fire in the hearth dwindles so does the tree of spirit rising from it. “Lucretius' / seed of fire ignis semina is seed semina mortuis / / of death in the same split second.”

Three other sorts of transformations parallel this central one. In the brief parenthetical phrase that echoes the burden of “My Grandmother Washes Her Feet,”—“dirt we rose from, dirt we'll never forget”—human beings rise from the ground and are rooted there, no matter the changes which transpire in any individual life. Human will, similarly, may “cast forward / into the flesh of light itself / … angry against the stream of time.” Perhaps the poet, too, “can transform all / germens with an incantatory perception of what's / what or what's supposed.” These palimpsest possibilities layered against the basic image of the tree of spirit follow one another in the poem pell-mell, each growing from the other, the form enacting transformation while articulating its stages. The energy of language and prophetic will twined together leads Fred to a credo: it can make

every tree that stands a Christmas tree, Christmas
on Earth, though even as I recall the beautiful
manifesto my faith flickers & dwindles, we are not
born for the rarer destinies only for the rarest,
we are born to enter the tree of smoke, backbone of
the world of substance, born to smear our life stuff
against the zodiac, & as I take down in matter
the spine of the world & will send it up again in
spirit a feeling that these things are so indelibly
correct overtakes me. …

Part of the primary drama of this extraordinary poem consists of its entertainment. It is interesting, first of all, various and full of surprising turns, holding together voice and attention (poet's and reader's) as well as holding out alternative ways of speaking about the relationship of matter to spirit. The Lucretian focus, a naturalistic philosophy both ancient and contemporary, balances, as it were, in the middle of a spectrum.

At one end is nothingness, the terrifying possibility that a “roaming / puddle of gravitons, a winter's night the black / hole, comes this way striding and yanks the tree / of light elongate like a sunny licorice down / the drain.”

Fred explicitly rejects the terror of nothingness, along with the will-less condition of Nirvana (which he has earlier called “a sterile and joyless blasphemy”), in the opening poem of Earthsleep, indicating by their juxtaposition that the latter is a version of the former. “What there is in emptiness,” he says,

                                                                      … let it consume itself,
Let it mass and flounder yonder from the skin
Of things, let it not come nigh this hearth, this hold,
This house, let the cloud of unbeing never touch
Our garish boxes of fervor.

In the same series of refusals he seems also to include Lucretius' eternal atomistic dispersal and configuration; he mentions “Another” world, “where no water sings with / Its breath of fire, where sunlight the cloud never / Ripens to peach, where the single atoms stray / lost and touchless.” Lucretius' vision, I think, slides to the negative end of the spectrum here. (A complementary comic rejection occurs in Earthsleep, IV, where “The Ideal World,” Platonic in its evocative details, “sounds like a Grand Hotel / Emptied out because of chicken pox.”) The double nadir of “Susan Bathing,” which produces abject fear in Fred, is, first, that he will not be able to praise her adequately (in “Birthday 35” in River to have his mouth stopped is “despair”) and, second, that Susan will vaporize and disappear. After confronting such motions toward vacuum, Fred pushes “more fiercely” his face to Susan's breast and begins a series of allusive reprises of earlier poems which have centered on experiences of healing contact with people he loves.

It is not surprising, given Fred's heritage, that atomistic philosophy is insufficient, since Lucretius includes the soul among material things. A central thrust of his arguments in De Rerum Natura is to remove from his auditors their fear of punishment after life by arguing that the soul, like everything else, disperses into autonomous, anonymous atoms. There was, therefore, no hereafter to fear. This is not only too neat and reductive for a mind as probing, doubtful, and inventive as Fred Chappell's, it also dismisses too cerebrally what he has absorbed into the veins of his imagination from birth. If Lucretius had grown up with Fred's grandparents and parents he would have rejected atomism, too. Fred's profound disinclination also proceeds from his sensuality, and, perhaps above all, from his unstaunchable love of life. In his splendid essay on Lucretius in Three Philosophical Poets, George Santayana observed that at the bottom of Lucretius' insistent opposition to immortality was a fear of life. Santayana called this an “untenable ideal.” “What is dreaded,” he wrote,

is the defeat of a present will directed upon life and its various undertakings. … To introduce ascetic discipline, to bring out the irony of experience, to expose the self-contradictions of the will, would be the true means of mitigating the love of life; and if the love of life were extinguished, the fear of death, like smoke rising from that fire, would have vanished also.

Fred clearly is no ascetic. He seeks everywhere to embrace life, to fire the world with his will, in the local and temporal frame of Midquest to celebrate his birthday, and to continue his fundamentally hopeful, Dantesque journey toward light.

At the other extreme is the Christmas tree and its extension at the end of “Firewood” into images of marriage, procreation, and, finally, salvation. The sexual and marital similes which are salted into the opening page of the poem (e.g., “marriage/vow joints,” “nice girls back in high school”) receive their more serious resolution in phrases such as “the wedge goes in like semen,” and “the river-clean smell of opened / flesh comes at me as the annunciation to Mary,” the latter reference also echoing the more extended annunciation passage in “Susan Bathing.” Immediately following these focuses is Fred's assertion, “I'm washed in the blood of the sun,” a variation of “blood of the Lamb,” in context suggesting, with “Christmas on Earth,” a Christian salvation, an implicit answer to the parenthetical question, “But where shall I sit when once this flesh is spirit?” The “flesh! more flesh” at the heart of the riven log is analogous to the Christian incarnation and helps one understand the source of Fred's love of the earth and life on it that pervades Midquest. (“The flesh the earth is suits me fine” is a representative instance.) The poem following “Firewood” deals with a real fire, the conflagration that destroyed Fred's grandfather's church. Its concluding passage reinforces the sacramental, transforming vision of “Firewood.” In form and language imitating Old English alliterative verse, the poem presents Fred and Susan coming to the site of the fire years later to find it altogether revivified, a “victory of spirit.”

                                                                                                    Time took it anew
and changed that church-plot                    to an enchanted chrisom
of leaf and flower                    of lithe light and shade.
Pilgrim, the past                    becomes prayer
becomes remembrance rock-real                    of Resurrection
when the Willer so willeth                    works his wild wonders.

This is stated as unequivocally as “the spine of the world” passage quoted above.

Other, less extended instances of the Christian mode of transformation abound. The world was formed as “The purer spirits surged ever upward / Shucking the gross-pig matter their bodies” (“Fire Now Wakening on the River”). Sexual union in “Bloodfire Garden” burns the lovers “down again to the ghost of us … Burnt off, we are being prepared.” The stirring of a slight breeze becomes for the grandmother in “Second Wind” “the breath of life … / Renewal of spirit such as I could never / deny.” “The resplendent house of spirit bursts around the body” in a richly evocative scene on Wind Mountain (“Earth Emergent Drifts the Fire River”). The four elements carried by the winds are “Suffering of Spirit, suffering of elements, / In one mass,” in “Dawn Wind Unlocks the River Sky.” Both the poems celebrating jazz in Wind Mountain embody the idea from Schopenhauer that acts as epigraph in Chappell's homage to Louis Armstrong: “Music is the world over again,” but in impalpable sound, another form altogether. At the close of that poem man becomes “half funky animal, half pure music, / meat & spirit drunk together.”

The spiritual choice which I am suggesting Midquest reticulately and dramatically enacts is more sharply underlined by three poems at the close of Source, published in 1985, four years after Midquest's serially printed volumes (1975, 1978, 1979, 1980) were collected into one. In “Urlied” Chappell puts words (some anachronistic) into Lucretius' mouth, having him reject immortality via Rilke and the familiar anthropomorphism of Olympus. Conversely, Lucretius reiterates his “trust” in the forces of dissolution and coalescence (love/strife, Venus/Mars) and draws this comfort from his system: “There's nothing personal in it.” The evaluation is heavily ironic, however, being true as a description of the movement of matter but devastatingly false when applied to the emotional effect of losing one's identity. Chappell articulates this dreadful rift in the last section of the poem, evaluating Lucretius' endeavor as fundamentally courageous and integral, but, finally, without solace. He leaves Lucretius in the “white fountain of delirium / Burning but not purified,” recalling both the close of T. S. Eliot's “The Fire Sermon” and the final stanza of his own “Feverscape: The Silver Planet” in Midquest. Once again, the Lucretian vision, for all its radically compelling perception into the material nature of things, is bleak and isolate, not transforming in a way Chappell finds desirable.

The other two poems set against “Urlied” involve ascent. “Message” employs Lucretian terminology, but Chappell's context involves dimensions basically apostate to the Roman poet's system: 1) the controlling metaphor of ascension, 2) an increased understanding by the grief-stricken sufferer, and 3) a concern with expressing that understanding in language. In choosing among his sorrows, the “he” of the poem becomes the measure of his own grief. There is also in the use of an angel as messenger “purely clothed in terror” in the opening lines an implicit acceptance of this aspect of Rilke, contrasted to his dismissal by Lucretius in the preceding poem.

More telling still is “Forever Mountain,” the final poem in Source. Chappell presents his father ascending, after death, Mt. Pisgah, a mountain about fifteen miles southeast of Canton, North Carolina, Chappell's hometown, but also the mountain from which God showed Moses the promised land. Words from the hymn “Sweet Hour of Prayer” are relevant to the vision the poem renders: “'Til from Mt. Pisgah's lofty height / I view my home and take my flight.” J. T. Chappell doesn't fly, but he does leisurely ascend the mountain, “taking the time / He's got a world of.” He observes “The quality of light come over him,” spends a dreamful night, “rises glad and early and goes his way, / Taking by plateaus the mountain that possesses him.” He has come a far piece from the Pilate-like figure he cut when we last saw him in Midquest. At the poem's close Chappell's “vision blurs with distance,” Pisgah becomes Forever Mountain, “a cloud / That light turns gold, that wind dislimns.” The shift from the figure of his father to Chappell's blurred vision has much the same effect as would an unmitigated focus on the father's assumption into a new form. We witness an ascension of body to light and transformation, the context and perspective explicitly Biblical, implicitly Christian. Between “Message” and “Forever Mountain,” in fact, Chappell places a terse and rending avatar of another hymn, “O Sacred Head Now Wounded,” dealing with the mocking of Jesus' suffering during his trial and crucifixion.

II. PRAYER; ORTHODOXIES

I called “Forever Mountain” a vision, but Chappell calls it, in an italicized line appended to the poem, a prayer. It is noteworthy that it's not a vision, or a wish, or a hope, but specifically a prayer. Source, in fact, contains three other poems so labeled, each of them depicting a merging of the one who prays with the particular conditions he prays about (“about” in the sense of concerning, and circling). In the first, “A Prayer for the Mountains,” it is a peaceable kingdom he both accepts as existing and desires to exist, wanting to “share the sleep / Of the cool ground's mildest children.” In “A Prayer for Slowness” he seeks to be not content but filled with giving, as the cow in the poem has “her rich welcome / … taken from her.” “A Prayer for Truthfulness” concerns the poet's release of his poem from his control into its own illumination, able to say finally “its last abandonment.” The three prayers are, in short, not self-focused or escapist or acquisitive; in fact, insofar as they ask for anything, it is a place among the portions of other creatures into which Chappell may meld his being and talent.

Prayer is, of course, as complex an area as the other spiritual matters in Fred Chappell's work. I'm no expert on it by any stretch of the imagination, but a few thoughts may at least serve to disperse its associations beyond mere petition.

The extraordinary act of paying conscious attention may be considered a form of prayer. Prayer may be a tonality, an indication in declarative statements or questions that the speaker is tuned somewhere to spiritual dimensions he may not be addressing directly. “Where've you been?” asked in a certain way, for instance, can be a prayer, as Kathy Mattea's recent song by that name shows. A lived life can be a prayer, though that is difficult to specify except perhaps in the cases of some saints. Prayer is not necessarily even supplication, but may be homage, or gratitude, or acceptance, or lament, or bewilderment, spoken or enacted or felt toward the immanent presence of a power greater than one's self. It may be a habit or an attitude. In Hamlet, Claudius' prayer, though his thoughts “remain below,” is still a prayer. That which impels our attention away from the self, or turns the will toward imagination may, speaking as broadly as possible, be considered prayer. Chappell refers to Midquest in his “Preface” as “in its largest design a love poem”; from a number of these perspectives the book could also be thought of as a prayer.

Individual poems, too, embody this possibility. “Susan Bathing” is a prayer of worship, praise, and adoration, “My Grandmother's Dream of Plowing” a prayer for release and forgiveness, “My Father Allergic to Fire” for acknowledgement and continuance. And so on.

The prayers per se dispersed throughout Midquest, though not explicitly indicated as the ones in Source, are not so much disguised as diverse. Chappell composes and aims them variously.

“Birthday 35: Diary Entry” concludes with a prayer in the more traditional mode of petition: “Please, Lord. I want to go to some forever / Where water is, and live there.” Until the final three lines it is a plea for an anthropomorphic afterlife (part of the pattern “How to Build the Earthly Paradise” and “At the Grave of Virgil Campbell” later extend) where current pleasures pertain, an “Elysium … plentifully planted”

With trout streams and waterfalls and suburban
Swimming pools, and sufficient chaser for bourbon.

Its tone is wise-ass jaunty, its diction hip, its beat and varying line lengths accumulating a pseudo-music-hall effect that seeks to minimize the prayerful imploration, as a sophisticated dude cultivates a cool exterior to cover his sensitivity. But in the last three lines the more serious underlying concern breaks through: he wants the water of heaven to “wash … away sin.”

The going up in flames of Fred's grandfather's church (Bloodfire, VI), and the site's transformation seventeen years later “to the stark beginning where the first stars burned” becomes the ground for the definition of prayer that ends the poem. What has been a catastrophe is subsequently seen as part of a reenactment of the resurrection of Jesus.

Pilgrim, the past                    becomes prayer
becomes remembrance rock-real                    of Resurrection
when the Willer so willeth                    works his wild wonders.

“The Willer,” presumably not a human being, is involved in the process of prayer defined here. The experience itself is prayer, in which the divine will is inextricably woven, suggesting that God's involvement in history is not limited to the incarnation of Jesus.

I'm not sure if the more dire self-immolation of the Buddhist monks in “Bloodfire” should be included in this context, but it seems possible. What miraculous renewal may be hidden in the most awful destruction is part of the dread mystery of God's will.

Chappell uses fire as an agent of transformation again in connection with prayer in “Bloodfire Garden.” In a remarkable merging of garden and bed, brushfire and loinfire (“the disease / necessary to know God”), Fred remembers praying as he watched the blackberry vines, scythed and “raked up in barbarous heaps,” put to the torch. It was, he says, a moment in which

I went stark sane, feeling under my feet
the hands of blackberry fire
rummaging
unfurrowed earth.

What, if anything, he prays for is unspecified, but his act is embedded in images that suggest not only fire as incipient plow (“rummaging”: the area is being cleared for planting) but also the burning of human bodies (“frying lattice / of dry bones”) and the incarnation of spirits (“ghosts began again to take flesh”). In the other half of the poem's context of burning—the bedroom—after the lovers' climax “a cool invisible smoke goes up / from our bodies, it is grateful / prayer, sigil / of warm silence between us.

In this garden our bed, we have burned
down again to the ghost of us.

In both contexts the burning down has resulted in renewal, or the readying for it. “Burnt-off,” the lovers “are being prepared”; the burning off of the wild blackberry vines is a preparation as well for new growth. The image of dry bones has suggested the vulnerability of the apparently solid human body and driven young Fred to sanity and prayer; the aftermath of the fire of sexual union is prayer as well, associated with gratitude. In this context the fresh rain blowing up “out of the green isles / of Eden,” with its implication of renewed creative harmony with the Creator, seems entirely appropriate.

Fred's first prayer, the one in “Birthday 35” to which I've referred above, follows a vision of Time in which he sees “nothing human,”

No man, no woman,
No animals or plants; only moon
Upon moon, sterile stone
Climbing the steep hill of void.

This waste land (part of a longer passage which I think consciously echoes T. S. Eliot's poem) leads to Fred's admission, “I was afraid.” This process of a fearful vision of bleakness leading to prayer occurs again in at least two noteworthy places. In Earthsleep, I, Fred talks to himself, or, more accurately, to his “Mind,” whom he calls “Old Crusoe.” In the context of wondering if they are both lost on “this bright and lonely spark” he asks three questions about their eventual fate. The questions are directed at “Earth” but involve the other three elements central to Midquest. All of the alternatives are terrifying: “black waters streaming / Deathward,” “in wind to suffer shorn of flesh,” and “fire, the raging ecstasy / … of burning foreknowledge.” After such imagined vistas, the next utterance is a prayer.

                                                                                                                        Do not us Earth
Remember.
                                        Leave us, mud jumble of mirk
And humus, tucked in the rock heart
Of the mountain, in these stones are seeds of fire,
Dream-seeds which taking root shall renew the world,
Tree of Spirit lifting from the mountain of earth. …

I take this prayer to be a refusal to identify the human creature as simply a concatenation of elemental substances. We are no more fully accounted for as such a composite than we are as Lucretian molecular aggregates, or energy diminishing toward the cold will-lessness of Nirvana. Human creatures are elemental, yes, but also infused with spirit. Fred's prayer here is childlike in its desire that Earth simply forget him and Susan and tend to some other business. They'll take a spiritual form (the tree of spirit from “Firewood”) analogous to the earthly tree—an appeasing gesture?—and grow on transmuted, as spirit mysteriously grows. This eases into two afterprayers, asking “Earth” for gentleness, and “Destiny” for sweet treatment. The tone and focus here is relief after the exhausting effort of imagination that precedes it.

The same process occurs finally in starker, more condensed form in the closing poem of the volume (and the book).

                                                                                Here where I find
I am I founder.
                                                                                Lord Lord
Let this lost dark not.

Not what? is the inevitable question. Swallow us up, as the sea overwhelms a foundering ship? That seems the most immediate likelihood. The prayer itself is so close to the terror that impels it that it cannot be completely uttered. The pattern of zeroes that occupy the volume (the “darkest vowel” of the well opening, for instance, the drains in the grandmother's and Susan's tub, the black hole in space in “Firewood”) has been perhaps the best preparation for what is most feared here from the dark.

These various spiritual radiations are rarely orthodox in any sense. But institutional Christian orthodoxies, too, occupy a substantial place in the spiritual experience of Midquest. The most accessibly presented are made part of the lives of Fred's forebears. Concerned for his salvation, his grandfather changes denominations (River, VII) and is baptized in the West Fork of the Pigeon River. Later, speaking from the grave (Earthsleep, IX), “Here where it's / Still not Absolute,” he awaits “Judgment Day / when we can see once more in the Judgment Book / All that we've seen already, each nook / And cranny of us forever on display.” The tone of the latter poem is nettled and testy, a strong modulation of the comic surface of the former one; in both poems the man is of two minds about the perspectives the church has saddled him with, but there's no doubt he accepts its terms and forms, and takes them seriously.

These two poems deal with sacraments: baptism and burial. Fred's grandmother confronts another, marriage (River, VIII), seeing this commitment as analogous to Caesar's Rubicon: “If I cross this river I won't turn back.” When her husband dies (Wind Mountain, III) and she is faced with the public anonymity of everything, as well as the distracting hodgepodge of the funeral gathering, she wants to join him but aborts the idea immediately on orthodox grounds: “It's a sin to want yourself to die.” She utters this fundamental belief before the poem is well begun, then suffers the family and their best intentions until, unable to take any more, she walks outdoors, away from the house, to a place where “the rose / Vine climbed the cowlot fence and looked away / Toward Chambers Cove.” It is also a place in her spiritual life “where everything is hard as flint: / breathing, walking, crying even. It's a heathen / Sorrow over us.” In such a condition she is unable to help herself, but in the immobilizing heat of the day she feels a breeze stir, coming cornstalk leaf by cornstalk leaf across the field toward her. She understands this to be “the breath of life … / Renewal of spirit such as I could never / Deny and still name myself a believer.” This utterly convincing account ends with the freshening wind touching her face “so strong it poured on me the weight of grace.”

At the other extreme from this visitation of saving grace, Chappell places Fred's father's guilt over the manner in which he's buried Honey, an old mule dead after generations of labor on the farm (Earthsleep, III). Because the clayey ground makes the digging of a grave nearly impossible, J. T. breaks the animal's legs so he won't need so deep a hole. What he does and is witnessed doing is ineradicable, however, from his memory, in his “head for good and all and ever.” It's no wonder, given his account of it:

                                                                                                                        I busted her legs.
I busted her legs with the mattock, her eyes all open
And watching me crack her bones and bulging out
Farther slightly with every blow. These fields
Were in her eyes, and a picture of me against
The sky blood-raw savage with my mattock.

“Heavy is how I felt,” he says, “empty-heavy and blue as poison.” The context of the poem is J. T.'s washing at the pump two weeks later. He scrubs his hands for “maybe seven minutes,” dries them, and when he gives Fred the towel back, “there was his handprint, / Earth-colored, indelible, on the linen.” The figures of Pontius Pilate and Lady MacBeth lurk in the shadowy background here, and, for the moment anyhow, no grace pours down on anything.

The mule is already dead when J. T. breaks her legs, and his sense of guilt is mostly a projection of his sensitivity and compassion. The experience the grandmother's dream of plowing (Earthsleep, VIII) reveals, however, is a fundamental sin, the bearing of a child either prior to her marriage to Frank or through adultery during it. The skillfully dovetailed phases of her dream show her progressively unsuccessful attempts to disguise her act, its issue, and their consequences. Frank's plowing, itself an unprecedented vision for her, provides an apt contextual metaphor: something hidden is uncovered. Frank both unearths the object and asks the question that pitches the dream toward its identification: “Is that your baby that was never mine?” Anne—the grandmother, too, is named for the first time in the book, becoming a person not wholly identified through a role—“expects” at the start of her dream a church bell to be turned up by the plow, an object associated with Frank's past misfortune (the burning of his church) rather than her own sin. This is the first of the dream's series of displacements. The object turns out to be in its first incarnation a lump of gold which she cradles “to [her] breast.” Following Frank's question, Anne denies (to herself) it is a baby, but then suddenly “I knew it was a baby in my arm, / The strangest baby.” The displacements continue: the infant is compared to Jesus as he is depicted in The Upper Room—a daily devotional publication—and then becomes a “golden child” who will “bring us luck.” The creature she holds, however, continues to metamorphose towards the truth the dream is unlayering, finally becoming “an ugly little man,” “an evil little goblin / With an evil smile.” This truth is, of course, how Anne feels about the child, a slow revelation of her shame and awful self-condemnation projected outward into the form the dream work has presented as separate from her. She wishes it dead, and, “the awfullest part,” it dies. It is only after this that she is able to say, “It was my fault,” but her admission of responsibility is focused only on her desire for the figure's death, and her guilt, insofar as she articulates it to Fred, to whom she is recounting the dream, seems focused on this, too; she also considers the child as separate from herself in its innocence at this point: “Whatever harm had the little goblin done?” There seems no conscious owning up to her responsibility for its birth. Whether we are to take the death in the dream as indicating what happened to the actual baby is inconclusive, but the guilt is real enough: she has never waked from this dream. Incidentally, the revelation of this buried secret from her past casts a sharp light on her preoccupation in the previous poems about her with the “Shadow Cousins,” the profound hesitation she experienced before committing herself to marrying Frank, and our seeing her in two situations where she is washing something (her feet, her milk cans).

These poems compose behavior and attitudes derived from sectarian Christian assumptions undergirding central aspects of what one might call primary theology. Suicide, adultery, and the wish to murder are sins; guilt is inevitably consequent upon sin; grace is God-given and mysterious, coming in unpredictable forms and at unpredictable times; the sacraments are, no matter how one might seek to hedge one's bets through them, inviolable, their seriousness ingrained in the soul.

One of the assumptions inherent in Midquest appears to be that human beings, as Fred's grandmother fears, do grow away from their sources (this occurs both to individuals and to generations), but they appear to do so as a tree grows away from its roots, remaining one organism. Human beings are mobile, of course; I mean this analogy more to suggest temporal than spatial wholeness: as a tree grows in space so a person grows in time. Human beings can make disorienting and potentially destructive choices, but there is as well a genetic and behavioral determinism woven into their development. Midquest embodies Fred Chappell's fulfillment of the grandmother's vision by becoming a professor and author, leaving the farm behind, deserting, as he says, “manual labor for intellectual labor.” But the restless, doubt-ridden entertainments of his imaginative mind are largely informed by and directed at the physical, religious, and moral dimensions of the farm environment in which he was raised. I think this is the source, finally, of the spiritual and psychic healing and regeneration which Midquest seeks in its widest intention. In my context here, the central orthodox beliefs which define the family members seep into Fred's ways of probing his own diverse options.

This is clearest in the preoccupation with the relationship between matter and spirit—how to view incarnation—that pervades Midquest and informs much of Chappell's poetry subsequent to it. His terror in the face of nothingness and the anonymous dispersal of atoms is bearable because the Christian mode of understanding affords him a richer, more hopeful alternative. He is, of course, predisposed towards it, but too given to the mind's uncertainties to accept it without first testing the abysmal ontological possibilities that contradict it. His use of Dante's Divine Comedy as model and guide further underscores the influence orthodox configurations have on his work. (I will comment on Dante more specifically in Section III.)

Other, more local, instances arise frequently throughout the book. I have mentioned both the transformation Fred witnesses in Bloodfire, VI, and the serious note (“washes away sin”) toward which his prayer at the close of “Birthday 35” tends, and will refer later to his use of Jonah, Lazarus, and Joseph. Not surprisingly, in the pattern of praise for Susan in “Susan Bathing,” phrases from the Christian vocabulary of belief appear: “plenia gratia” (from the Catholic “Hail Mary” and Luke 1:28) in the Madonna passage, “let there be” from the creation story in Genesis. As a whole the poem, and the narrator's role in it, are informed by the conception of God as Word (John 1:1ff). In “Firewood” he alludes to man “in his fallen state.” In Earthsleep, VI, he tells the dead Virgil Campbell, “All the world is lit for your delight, / old Buddy, hook it to your hulk both hands, / It's a worship of God, though kinda primitive / I admit.”

These last two examples are drops in the larger welter of Fred's ruminations about the afterlife. They range from the pleasant, relaxed, anthropomorphic excursions in poems such as “The Peaceable Kingdom of Emerald Windows,” “At the Grave of Virgil Campbell,” and Wind Mountain, V, to the bleak visions of nothingness in “Firewood” and Earthsleep, I. What can be envisioned in familiar terms we can project ourselves into, evaluate and decide about, but a Christian vision of the soul's form after death is more troublesome. A genuine transformation—the Pauline idea of the “body imperishable” of I Corinthians: 35-57, for instance—is, like grace, a mystery and therefore by definition cannot be imaged (though the conditions of its mystery may be). Consequently, the alternative, desirable vision is only vaguely implied in Midquest, a spindrift of thought and faith. This quandary is sharply presented in “Birthday 35”:

But, Lord, You stand on one side
Of the infinite black ditch
And I on the other. And that's a bitch.

Fred is as fascinated, however, with how life may have begun as with what may follow it. From the touching desire to uncover, with his grandfather, “the final source of West Fork Pigeon River,” through the brief hints in the opening poem of each volume about “how the world was formed,” to the more complexly developed myths of creation in Wind Mountain, V (“a slightly different Big Bang theory”) and River, IX (“THE NOVEL”) he reveals an inventive, fervent desire to be present at beginnings (which, in the myths at least, he is). The title section (TWO) of Source elaborates this impulse, being composed of scattered, disparate myths, many dealing with first causes, each apparently seeking to embody an “explanation,” but, finally, explaining nothing.

In this preoccupation with the unknowns that border human life at either verge, he keeps in uneasy balance his inventive, informed intellectual curiosity and his spiritual tendency to accept the unknowable, or at least his place outside it. Here, as at so many other junctures of Midquest, a passage from “Birthday 35,” the true prelude to the volume, is pertinent.

I'd sleep in the eiderdown of the True Believer
And never nightmare about Either/Or
If I had a different person in my head.
But this gnawing worm shows that I'm not dead.
Therefore: either I live with doubt
Or get out.

III. STRUCTURES

One may enter Chappell's Midquest at any point and find, as with all coherent visions emanating from a center, the basic terms and images that shadow the whole. The poems radiate from and revolve around a hub—though within most of them there is a nicely composed narrative linearity, sometimes (e.g., “Susan Bathing,” “Second Wind”) reinforced by a psychological progression—so that one poem, or a sequence of poems, may enact the volume.

“Cleaning the Well” offers an instance of this, embodying in a single piece the general construction of Midquest as a Dantesque descent into hell and a rising toward light and redemption. Fred assists his grandfather in cleaning the well, the literal experience graphically presented from the double perspective of a young (eight to ten-year-old) boy doing the work and an adult creating a shape for his memory. Chappell gives various indications of the figurative perspective from which he sees the experience, and by which he wishes it evaluated. Dante's descent is, of course, the fundamental metaphoric enclosure, the “soundless dreaming / O” of the well's mouth functioning effectively as a fearsome gate to the netherworld, figuring Inferno's circles and the further possibility that nothingness may be at the bottom of things. The grandfather lowers Fred on pulley rope and harness, thus supporting him and becoming a “guide” (like Virgil) in a way appropriate to the context. The well itself is a version of the well at the center of the declining valleys of Malebolge, through which Dante enters Cocytus, the frozen wasteland of the final Circle of Inferno. Two of the boy's phrases particularize the broad connection. As he hits the water, he cries, “Whoo! It's God/damn cold!” and later, in response to his grandfather's asking how it's going, thinks, “It goes like hell.” Two italicized phrases express more formally the implications of these colloquial ones: at the terrifying point where the boy has been reduced to the condition of a noncreature (nerveless, sexless, breathless, mindless, and bodiless) occur the words, “I shall arise never”; similarly, at the other extreme of readjustment to the ground above, we read, “I had not found death good.”

Within the Dantesque frame Chappell has Fred compare himself to Jonah, Joseph, and Lazarus, adding a biblical lens through which the homey, local experience is considered. A particularly telling merging of psychological insight and literary allusion takes place in this stanza (14). Fred's return to upper earth has disoriented him as much as had the earlier descent into the gelid water. He recalls the foreboding dark as “holy” and tries, in his new disorientation, “to fetch [it] / Back.” He then wonders if the three biblical figures had also been “Ript untimely / from black wellspring of death.” There is the understanding of the human psyche's conservative nature, to want to remain in the condition to which it has become accustomed, so that the usual view of the miracles of the restoring to the world of Jonah, Joseph, and Lazarus is given an unexpected twist. In terms of the other allusive dimension here, Fred's resistance to his return recalls the resistance to waking with which each of the four volumes of Midquest begins, itself derived partly from Dante's tendency to sleep or swoon when faced with the pressure of attention and discovery (e.g., Inferno, I:11, III:136, and V:142; Purgatorio XVIII: 145). Finally, “wellspring of death” encapsulates the paradoxical understanding The Divine Comedy assumes, eventually tracing back to the felix culpa of Christianity.

Poems VI, VII, and VIII of Wind Mountain accomplish as a series what “Cleaning the Well” does as a single poem. A comic inversion of the poem it precedes, “My Father's Hurricane” is a tall tale J. T. regales eleven-year-old Fred with over “the ruins of an April supper.” The hurricane is immortalized as “Bad Egg,” which suggests it is the destructive opposite of “Egg,” the source of all life that Fred refers to hyperbolically in “Birthday 35: Diary Entry.” It is a five-layer conglomeration of all the stuff its power has uprooted and carries who knows where. J. T. travels upwards through each layer, fending off young Fred's common-sense questions, until he reaches layer five, composed of “lovebirds, honeypies, sweethearts,—whatever / You want to call them.” The mother stops the story at the point where it tends toward raunchiness, the lovers “Rolling & sporting in the wind like face cards / From a stag poker deck.” The simile indicates the more serious substance the poem makes light of—lust and the gamble one takes with one's soul when one gives in to it. Paulo and Francesca are among those J. T. sees in layer five, and the potential cost of lust becomes even more sharply focused by Fred's question, “But how did you get down without / Getting killed?” The answer to the question never comes, for the poem ends with J. T.'s voice cut off. Getting out is another story.

These last three details—the reference to Paulo and Francesca, the figurative implication that lust is a high-stakes gamble, and the allusion to death—would be sufficient to key the spiritual implications of this inverted hell. It is humorously presented, of course, and a dazzlingly inventive entertainment, but it is also from the outset suspiciously unsettling, beginning as it does with the comparison of J. T.'s cigarette smoke to a “dust cloud over a bombed-out city.”

The corrective to this odd ascent into a layer of “honeypies” begins with the title of the next poem. “In Parte Ove Non Eche Luca” is most of the final line of Canto IV of Dante's Inferno, and the poem it labels is a pretty fair country translation of Canto V. The chaotic uprooting of the previous poem becomes the “storm infernal” (Dante's “bufera” could be translated “hurricane”) of the second circle of Hell. Here the winds also conflict, unceasingly driving the damned Spirits “onward with brute force.”

Up they go to the very edge of the Course
          Of Ruin, complaining, lamenting, aghast.
          For them the Word Divine is sheer remorse.
Into this pain the lovers of flesh are thrust,
          All those who gave their human reason over
          To the delicious fever of carnal lust.

In short, J. T.'s “lovebirds” are here, hovering “in the torn air,” and this time no humor relieves their predicament. Chappell, however, updates the population by adding Casanova, a couple of poets and, from his own book, Virgil Campbell.

Campbell, in response to Fred's request that his Master and guide, the other Virgil, stop and bring him over to them, becomes the subject and speaker (à la Francesca) of the third poem in this group, “Three Sheets in the Wind: Virgil Campbell Confesses.” He tells his own tale, balancing formally J. T.'s hurricane story. It concerns his getting caught by his wife and the preacher in flagrante delicto with a willing country “gal you always hear about / And generally never meet.” It is another funny experience, well stitched together, but for all Campbell's ingratiating humor, cajolery, and wit, it is finally quite serious because of the context in which Chappell sets it. Ironies proceed from that context, too. The poem, a confession, begins with Campbell calling himself “a solid by God citizen,” but his country is the second circle of the Inferno. He understands his youthful penchant for moonshine and women as “a kind of crazy” in his blood that “nothing but / The worst that can happen will ever get … out.” He then says, “The worst that can happen never happened to me,” which is a lie, given his condition of damnation; it is also a sign of the rationalization and evasion of the truth which is traditionally characteristic of the damned. Virgil Campbell could have sold cider to Eve. His story leads him to make the familiar promise of those caught in a terrifying trap—he believes, sewed up in one of his wife's sheets, that he's died and gone to hell, and so he thinks

                                                                                how I'd do it different if
I could only live my earthly life again:
I'd be a sweet and silent religious man.

He gets out of the story's contretemps, of course, and the final line of the poem, in which he decides to have a drink, indicates how ineptly he has kept that rash promise. “Where's the harm?” he asks rhetorically, ready to bend his elbow, repeating the same question he asks earlier in the poem in justifying with wonderful sophistic logic his adultery. The harm is perdition, no matter the charm of the lothario; Campbell is a convincing embodiment of the giving over of human reason “to the delicious fever of carnal lust.” In the larger series of poems centering on Virgil Campbell in Midquest, it is clear that Fred is affectionately and generously disposed toward him; he feels great kinship with him in the last of these, “At the Grave of Virgil Campbell.” But a loveable reprobate is still a reprobate, and in a book which takes seriously the fallen nature of humankind and traditional modes of dealing with that condition, I think the implications of this trio of poems are inescapable.

This group, then, repeats in extended form, and with more widely varying tonalities, the descent motif of “Cleaning the Well,” using Dante's model more pervasively, making explicit the dimension of Hell's eternal enclosure. These four poems focus also Midquest's recurrent entertainment from different perspectives of the possibility of an afterlife and what spiritual alternatives face its central figure, the pilgrim Fred Chappell on his 35th birthday, pressing toward “the love that moves itself in light to loving.”