Bruce Beasley

And Go into the Street Which Is Called Straight

     And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the street which is called Straight, and enquire in the house of Judas for one called Saul, of Tarsus.
     —Acts 9:11

     The street called Straight is straighter than a corkscrew, but not as straight as a rainbow. St. Luke is careful not to commit himself; he does not say it is the street which is straight, but “the street which is called Straight.” It is the only facetious remark in the Bible, I believe.
     —Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad

     (frangere: Latin, to break)

Go: fraction, fragile, frangible, infringe—
the relatives of refrain, sharers

of fracture’s fracturing. To repeat
is to break back. To repeat is to break

back. And the obsessive refrain
(vanished awhile)

I hear now again, like birdsong: backlit, echolalic.
For years it has broken back and back

in my mind, on days like this, to murmur Half, Half
in love, in love with easeful

what. To insist I see again,
in the Roman cemetery, each slashed-

in-marble letter (each shadow in the word’s gash)
of Keats’s epitaph: Here lies one

whose name was writ in water—
Writ in water

chiseled forever into stone.
Engraved. In fractures. Here, lies: chisel

means, too, to swindle, to cheat.
Half, half-in-love, half-in-love with easeful

who. When I have fears
that I might cease. Glean

my teeming. Fragile. Frangere. Refrain. Ease
the burden of always turning,

unmendable, back again, into words. Engraved. Lot’s wife. One’s name
in water writ. Or in marble, and the gilded monuments.

Unmended. And denamed. On the serpentine
Street Called Straight, where went blinded Saul.

Where went blinded Saul unto
forgiveness, and the burn of flesh.

And the crooked
shall, amen, be straightened.

Strait the gate, and narrow the way.
Half in love. In water writ. Keats’s handkerchief and death mask.

The handkerchief called handkerchief. The life mask called death mask.
From his cramped bed he stared at the daisy wainscot

—clots of lung blood on his pillow—
imagined moldering in the grave, gazing

upward at the daisies—All, all
in love, all in love with easeful

Death. Burden:
from the sound of a bee’s droning. Call it Straight,

that moment of blinding, hobbling
hand in hand down the crooked Street Called Straight.

The refrain’s a brokenness, though it reaches back, like Orpheus,
to reattach, saying

Come back, come back, the crooked shall be made straight,
saying Straight is the gate, and narrow the way,

murmuring Rich to die, murmuring
To cease upon the midnight with no,

repeating bee-drone. Horse’s hooves. The aquiline road.
Where wend blinded Saul, bearing

the name of a tormented king, the burden
of his burden, its stuck

song. Frangible,
fragment, infringe. Straight is not

the way:
to convert is to turn

around. And around again. And around. In the whirl-
current, the barnacle-sharp

inlet where I scrabbled my name
today, with a split

stick in spindrift
froth and spume, in cursive

strands of seawrack, and watched
its letters eddy out of their cove, unravel

around each other and snarl
into the gush, broken

back, broken
up (Half-in-love), Straightway

then Paul preached,
in the chiseled

water, in the
tide-rips through the so-called Straits.

BRUCE BEASLEY is the author of four collections of poems, most recently Signs and Abominations (Wesleyan University Press). He has other recent work in Grand Street, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and other journals. He teaches at Western Washington University.

“And Go into the Street Which Is Called Straight” appears in our Autumn 2002 issue.

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