The Priest's Lament


I lie here
 watching the receding afternoon's shadow
 dragging upon the cheap and chequered tile floor.  

In this nursing home there are only receding shadows
 and I share their life.
In this scrubbed and shrubbed
 nursing home for priests
 who have lost their calling, or

Whose lives have been sucked dry by too many years
 of celibacy.

Celibacy, after all, is the culprit:
 horny celibacy full of lies,
 full of the Ladies Altar Society's meetings,
 full of  the Altar Boys' meetings.  
 It has its life in unreadable Roman documents
 which ache with age in their Roman vaults.

I knew celibacy at first hand
 (as others say of legislative evil).  
I knew afternoons of lusting 
 for the knowledge of the tree of good and evil.

I would have settled for evil.  

And the immense black guilt which followed my private sessions.
I knew pain when I knelt before the sacrament 
 and signed myself with 
 that sign.

The Sundays were easiest:
The older men and I knew
 even without beckoning
 that we were partners in fraud. 
I could say the grossest heresies and know
 that I would get the same $73.34 in the collection.

It is the country celibacy, involving and encompassing the
 full amplitude of sin,
 which was the worse.

When the ample curve of the apron
 of the country maid, would push me to my meager limits.


James Bolner, Sr.
Baton Rouge
June 10, 1993