Brian Brodeur

Jones Very in the Parlor

          "As soon as we were in the parlor door he laid his hand on my head—and said ‘I come to baptize you

          with the Holy Ghost and with fire’—and then he prayed.”

          —Elizabeth Peabody, September 1838, the month Very was admitted to McLean Asylum 

You look much flushed. Have I offended you? 

Blessed are those who grant me audience, 

and heed my humble words like sabbath bells.

No trenchers of fresh meat, no opiates

will salve the icy sting our lives become.

Once I renounced these, I was visited—

my lamp flared in its bracket to the beams.

With fiery tread, His bright robes leonine,

He flung my blankets from my bed, and warmed me

by His own heat, which singed my rumpled gown.

I felt His heavy hair fall on my breast

as he opened me, gripped my heart in His fist,

and ate of me as one eats rancid fruit.

Whatever your saving-sin: love, beauty, truth—

He hacks it out of you. Do you conceive me?

It’s only blasphemy if it’s untrue. 

How many have you seen locked in their cell 

who gaze long-fixed at dim reflections cast

in cloudy glass, not knowing what they behold?

I am the one who calls the heralds forth—

you only have to curse this vulgar grammar,

this raiment of the self which hides the soul,

to breach the holts and bowers of Paradise

on Earth—right now—before your thread is spun.

Brian Brodeur is the author of four poetry books, most recently Some Problems with Autobiography (2023), which won the 2022 New Criterion Poetry Prize. Recent poems and literary criticism appear in Hopkins Review, Image, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Pushcart Prize XLIX (2025). He lives with his wife and daughter in the Whitewater River Valley.