Help from the Audience

Nothing to worry about if your own approval

Isn't enough for you and you need an audience.

Choose it yourself and you'll still be free,

Your mother and father looking on from the front

row

Only if invited. And of all your teachers

Only those few you learned from.

And just the friends you always wanted to please

But not impress. They don't have to make a sound.

Just the thought of them watching you is enough

To steady and brighten a path that otherwise

Would feel forlorn. Even the proud man's hero,

Achilles,

Who dreams of taking Troy alone with his friend-

Everyone else dead on the battlefield-

Imagines the gods looking on with approval.

And if he cares what the distant immortals think,

Why shouldn't you care about the mortals,

The ones who understand how little time remains

For you to complete the life you've chosen.

Maybe you need only one observer,

And only on the day when the words of reason,

Well-meaning as always, are hard to apply,

As remote from the case at hand

As St. Thomas's Summa must have felt to Dante

When he lost his way. Lucky for him

He could turn to Beatrice, the ghost

Who watched him, sober-faced, from across the

stream.

She didn't have to utter a word to make obvious

What choices would disappoint her, the glance of a

girl

More piercing than the edicts of Pope or Emperor,

Her sunrise scattering squads of shadows.

CARL DENNIS

If you're more a sinner than Dante was,

With less to show for it, be sure the audience you

imagine

Is endowed with an extra supply of patience.

The man you banish in Act One for speaking plainly

Must return like Kent in Act Two to serve again.

The woman you've disinherited like Cordelia

Must still believe that under your pride and rancor

You're waiting for the chance to reappear.

HOLY BRETHREN

If I don't believe the doctrine of my neighbor's

church,

The church of the Holy Brethren, that we're sinners

all

And need to repent each night and ask forgiveness,

I don't believe it's foolish. Some metaphor of the truth

Is hidden there, a crust from the loaf baked long ago

And broken and scattered among the seekers.

And if his church nurtures his many virtues,

I'm glad he belongs, my generous neighbor,

First to help when my basement's flooded,

Last to leave the soup kitchen of his church

Saturday night, when others have gone dancing.

If I had the money I'd make a contribution

So the clapboard walls of his church

In the low-rent district could be repainted.

I'd lift its burden of debt to lift his spirits.

Then he'd be less likely to hunt around

For an incarnation that seems more tangible,

More potent than the one his church is built on.

It hurts me to see how he's planted in front of his

house

A thirty-foot, silvery flagpole with a ten-foot flag.

I wish its flapping sounded like the soft voices of

sinners