Joshua McKinney
Revelation
It is a translation, a faithless beauty—faithless to what is not in accord with the exigencies of a pure language.
—Paul Valéry
When Mrs. Middleton stopped singing and cried
out, I turned to learn the cause and saw
that she had risen, her eyes skyward
and wide and spilling tears. Then
her body, as if locked in a dog’s jaws,
shook, and she opened her mouth and poured
forth a flood of vowels, part canticle, part howl—
such a burning current of weird words surging
back to pure sound that my stunned ears drowned
in the babble and I trembled in my pew.
Terrified as I was, I remember thinking, even then,
that Jimmy’s mom was faking it. How could
that woman be the same who served us Wonder
Bread bologna sandwiches for lunch, who peeked into
our backyard tent to say, “Lights out, boys”?
And how could she have held that in, and how
could she reveal, as the preacher hallelujahed
and the pipe organ groaned, that she spoke
a language channeled from a place
that words could not describe,
some hoard of divine inside-out-English
inside her that she had concealed from me
like some shrouded private part?
I might as well have seen her nude.
After that I turned away from church, thinking
my father, for once, was right—Sundays
were for doing chores and watching sports.
It was easier to think such ecstasy an act
than to believe that someone could speak
a tongue she didn’t even know she spoke. But
something in me woke that day, and I could not
forget the rapturous cry that scared yet
tempted me to comprehend the passion
of an incoherent call. Since then,
I’ve come to recognize the poetry of praise,
the praise in poetry. True sound makes sense,
and for many years I’ve longed to hear that
joyful noise again. I’ve tried to imagine my own
ten-year-old face and what the look on it
was like as fear, disdain, some disbelief, and
even awe, arm-wrestled in my brain and
I struggled with the impulse to run. Was it
the same look I’ve seen on so many faces,
acquaintances and strangers, even friends, when
gathered on bleachers or around a barbecue
grill, I’ve answered the obligatory question,
“What do you do for a living?” I give
the short answer because the long one
would reveal too much, if I could even find
the words. It would involve describing my epiphany
that Mrs. Middleton, her name was Virginia,
had no control over the strange dialect
she so ardently divulged. And her tears—
I’d have to explain how long it took for me
to learn that joy and pain are kin, that
it takes a strenuous tongue to see it. And
where else but in church could she have shared?
I’d have to say that I get it now; if you make
such proclamations in the street, at worst,
they lock you up. At best, they turn away.
I’d have to talk about how I’ve been trying
half a century to learn to speak the inspired ghost-
speech I heard that day, just so I could hear it
again and feel the feeling feeling gave me.
I’d have to tell how I’ve had to unlearn
every failed attempt, and how every attempt
failed. I’d have to admit that I’ve spent my life
trying to pronounce the unpronounceable,
to listen and receive, to comprehend the measure
of those familiar unfamiliar sounds that shook me
and became my only faith. And what’s worse,
I’d have to confess, I only worshipped the words.
Joshua McKinney’s fifth book of poetry, Sad Animal (2024), won the inaugural John Ridland Poetry Prize from Gunpowder Press. His work has appeared in such journals as Boulevard, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, New American Writing, and many others. His other awards include The Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize, The Dickinson Prize, The Pavement Saw Chapbook Prize, and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing. He is co-editor of the online ecopoetics zine, Clade Song.
