"Supernatural Love" by Gjertrud Schnackenberg

Supernatural Love

My father at the dictionary-stand

Touches the page to fully understand

The lamplit answer, tilting in his hand

His slowly scanning magnifying lens,

A blurry, glistening circle he suspends

Above the word “Carnation.” Then he bends

So near his eyes are magnified and blurred,

One finger on the miniature word,

As if he touched a single key and heard

A distant, plucked, infinitesimal string,

“The obligation due to every thing

That’s smaller than the universe.” I bring

My sewing needle close enough that I

Can watch my father through the needle’s eye,

As through a lens ground for a butterfly

Who peers down flower-hallways toward a room

Shadowed and fathomed as this study’s gloom

Where, as a scholar bends above a tomb

To read what’s buried there, he bends to pore

Over the Latin blossom. I am four,

I spill my pins and needles on the floor

Trying to stitch “Beloved” X by X.

My dangerous, bright needle’s point connects

Myself illiterate to this perfect text

I cannot read. My father puzzles why

It is my habit to identify

Carnations as “Christ’s flowers,” knowing I

Can give no explanation but “Because.”

Word-roots blossom in speechless messages

The way the thread behind my sampler does

Where following each X I awkward move

My needle through the word whose root is love.

He reads, “A pink variety of Clove,

Carnatio, the Latin, meaning flesh.”

As if the bud’s essential oils brush

Christ’s fragrance through the room, the iron-fresh

Odor carnations have floats up to me,

A drifted, secret, bitter ecstasy,

The stems squeak in my scissors, Child, it’s me,

He turns the page to “Clove” and reads aloud:

“The clove, a spice, dried from a flower-bud.”

Then twice, as if he hasn’t understood,

He reads, “From French, for clou, meaning a nail.”

He gazes, motionless. “Meaning a nail.”

The incarnation blossoms, flesh and nail,

I twist my threads like stems into a knot

And smooth “Beloved,” but my needle caught

Within the threads, Thy blood so dearly bought,

The needle strikes my finger to the bone.

I lift my hand, it is myself I’ve sewn,

The flesh laid bare, the threads of blood my own,

I lift my hand in startled agony

And call upon his name, “Daddy Daddy”—

My father’s hand touches the injury

As lightly as he touched the page before,

Where incarnation bloomed from roots that bore

The flowers I called Christ’s when I was four.

Source of the text - Gjertrud Schackenberg, Supernatural Love: Poems 1976-1992.  New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000, pp. 129-131.

Bourguignomicon: Lexicon-iambics. In these recursive, singsong-arpeggios, an earthly father learns of the deep roots of words from his christlike daughter.