Embedded Files
Outside rothko chapel
Houston, TX, 2/16/24
And was it on this very bench I sat
Eleven years ago? New to the city,
I chose this chapel as my founding stop,
A sort of pilgrimage which kicked off what
Would soon become a residence, the space
Afforded by the canvases enough
To make a life in.
Still, I’ve grown to love
The outside of this chapel most, for here
A sculpture stands, the Broken Obelisk,
Surrounded by a thin reflecting pool.
How was it broken? How, then, to repair
Or leave this riven life still incomplete?
I have the tools which hold potential for
Destruction, healing.
No, it was back there
Where I once sat, ten yards or more away.
I am, a decade on, much closer to
The broken obelisk than that first day.
the Temporary Vision
Freedom of worship should not be denied, but every man, according to his own inclination and
wish, should be given permission to practice his religion as he chooses.
~ Constantine Augustus, 313 A.D. ~
It only lasted sixty years or so,
Not even two generations. Soon
The Theodosian edict edified
The empire with cathedral cornerstones,
And freedom of a certain sort was lost.
Or, if not lost, not recognized within
The words with which the laws defined the state
(The state both physical and personal,
The infrastructure of both roads and rights.)
What was the vision of the living corpus,
Polticum, ecclesium, and both?
A tension precious as the level’s lift:
All men are free—we will be Orthodox.
We will be Orthodox—all men are free.
Peter the aleut
originally published in Christianity and Literature
1
I’ll let you know this one up front:
Peter dies; he’s disemboweled. You
needn’t keep reading. It wasn’t called
Alaska then, but that’s where he
was born. In some icons you’ll see
little Peter in mission school,
and tall Herman, in red and gold
teaching from an open text while
the Kodiak mountains jut above
a frozen sea. As far as northern
legend tells us, Peter led a band
of trappers South to San Francisco.
But, while exploring oak and bay,
they were captured by Franciscans
who bound them, pressed them to recant
the teachings of the Russian monks.
“I am a Christian” Peter said.
“I will not betray my faith.”
They crushed his ankles, one by one,
cut off his fingers. He renounced
nothing. They slit him open,
silent as a doe among the oaks.
Some say the coyotes mourned him.
Some say the sun-brimmed hills turned red.
2
Dad hung his lung shot
sow from the third rung
of the steel windmill
down the canyon from
our rust-stuccoed ranch.
He said the pig breathed
wide bubbles of blood
as she went down. Now
her mouth just trickled
into sticky grass.
He passed knife through hide,
sliced skin in strips from
fat, then fat from muscle,
then all that from bone,
left a ribcage ripe
with dying organs,
still draining out the
fly-thick, clotted mouth.
The scent of all this
was the richest I’ve known.
3
Once Monterey got news of the mess,
and deemed the Russian threat not worth
the killing of such heretics,
the monks freed Peter’s trapping band,
who brought the news of Peter’s words
and death to Herman, hermit-saint,
confessor of all Kodiak,
who used a plank as a blanket.
When he heard the tale I’ve told
he burned a fir-resin incense,
knelt, and prayed before an altar;
there, on a thin, pine plank, painted
with pigment and egg, a God
slowly died with a spear-slit side.
Then Herman named Peter a saint
with “Holy Peter, pray for us!”
No Spanish sources mention any
of this. Only the Russians,
who, disappointed with poor trade
in California, their far east,
left that pagan coast to Spain—they
remember Peter on the cusp
of Fall, when leaves flush at hunting
season. And I only write this to say:
That was the richest scent I’ve ever known.
Timothy E. G. Bartel is a poet and professor from California. His work has recently appeared in First Things, Modern Age, and Solum Journal, and his latest collection is A Crown for Abba Moses: New and Selected Poems (2023). Timothy currently serves as Professor of Great Texts and Theology at Saint Constantine College.
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