Enlarging His Temple

The title of Michael Bazzett’s superb chapbook The Temple comes from W.S. Merwin’s poem “A Scale in May,” a line from which Bazzett includes as an epigraph: “if you find you no longer believe, enlarge the temple.” Like many poets, Bazzett is in conversation with his predecessors: Merwin, Robert Bly, and the Serbian Vasko Popa, most explicitly. These poems are marked by a wry humor, fantastical elements, and a God whose imperfections are regularly on display.

In “#1 Hit Song,” for instance, Bazzett puts readers in a music studio with God, upset at his producer and the process of recording what they hope will result in the title: “God is not happy. / Why the loops? Why the endless repetition? he says, / slamming the headphones down on the console.” After a break, God returns, his purpose renewed, and asks for mood lighting and a take with him alone at the piano:

God slips onto the stool, tugs gently at his beard,
frames a few hesitant minor chords then lifts his
voice into a haunting falsetto that is unbelievably
bad. It sounds like cat sex, like someone hurting
a child. But God’s so damn happy, no one cares.

The Temple by Michael Bazzett. Bull City Press, 2020. 39 pages. $12.

In other words, God’s happiness comes first, and it’s up to everyone around him—wunderkind producer, fellow musicians, audience—to keep him satisfied, even if it means not saving him from his own worst impulses. They’d rather he keep screeching into the microphone than admit the truth: God has the opposite of perfect pitch.

God sings to very different effect in the title poem. In it, the speaker considers making an addition to his temple, as Merwin instructed. He longs for a “temple beautiful / the way it was when I was a boy.” Back then, his faith was simpler, purer, as he believed that God “might occasionally wander in” to the temple. Even at a more advanced age (fifty), he would like to imagine a God who “check[s] out the acoustics // and maybe lift[s] his voice / in a song of praise / to something other than himself—.” Bazzett’s speaker implies that his adult view of God is as a selfish deity, one who he believes focuses on singing his own praises, not the juvenile version of the speaker’s past, who embodied the selflessness all religions expect of their followers. The above are the poem’s concluding lines and demonstrate Bazzett’s ability to expand the frame of his work in the end.

In “Sometimes the Body Gets Tired,” a poem about the way time wears on the body, the poem concludes in “a special form of yoga. // One part of you stretches / up toward sky, thin as smoke, while the other / roots down solid in the earth, chomping like a worm.” Bazzett is adept at both extremes captured in this pose; he celebrates the vastness of the sky above and the circumscribed existence below.

Throughout this chapbook, the poet’s meditations on God and the enlarging of the temple inevitably point back to humanity, in the subject of the collection’s speakers. The speaker of the sonnet “God,” dedicated to Ada Limon, announces, “Look, it’s not that I believe in him. Nor he / in me. We have moved beyond all that.” However, the speaker still believes in spending time with the deity, of “having someone there in the dark.” They watch headlights “knock / stray prayers loose from where they got / stuck on their way out, so many years ago.” God tells the speaker this is akin to finding lost piñata candy. But unlike the serendipity this might suggest, Bazzett warns of the bitter taste that develops after such a long period: “It’s kind of like chewing / tinfoil, he says. All that aching naked hope.” Once again, God seems burdened by his role. Perhaps, to the contrary, he is embarrassed by the speaker’s youthful naïveté in offering up prayers that were never received and, therefore, never acted upon. Here, the “aching naked hope” of humanity has been long ignored, either because of the speaker’s lost faith or God’s indifference, we cannot be sure.

Regardless of the answers to such questions, the pleasure of this collection is in the asking. Similarly, the concluding poem, “The Follower,” sets up a situation where the speaker follows an older version of himself down the street, finally “taking pleasure in his undiminished stride, / which steadily receded as I stopped to watch him disappear.” This speaker, who “contemplated proposing coffee” but “couldn’t read his [older version’s] expression,” is no more able to understand his life—past, present, and future—than previous speakers could understand a God who could sacrifice his own child:

Imagine watching a son
die and saying nothing. Imagine laying down 

a rusty knife and calling it love.

In The Temple, Bazzett has succeeded in exploring the presence, or absence, of God in his speakers’ lives and leaves readers pondering their own relationship to such a deity, no matter one’s religious orientation. That he can do this in a chapbook of less than forty pages is a testament to Bazzett’s impressive skill and thoughtful approach to his subject matter and craft. Readers can only hope that this collection becomes the basis for further exploration.