In the late Seventies, I worked on a poem about a different Therese, also a Carmelite sister,
Spanish mystic St. Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582) whom I had become fascinated with after reading
about her life. I made eight pages of handwritten notes as I researched and used these to write a
poem that I sent to the Paris Review, one of the many literary journals I submitted work to in those
years. Sister Teresa grew up in a Christian family with some Jewish lineage, people with resources
but not wealthy, in mountainous Spain, Castile.
As a child she was head-strong and once ran away with her brother, hoping to be martyred
for her faith. When she joined a convent at sixteen, the other sisters thought her to be happy.
Ailments plagued her from teenage years to age forty-five. Teresa associated her bodily trials with
Christ’s sufferings. Teresa’s ecstatic seizures set her apart as a figure in rapture. She believed her
extreme physical episodes were spiritually sparked. My poem ends: “a mad Fire gets the bones as if
marrow were to luminesce / with the light of a thousand suns. / The body brims in cool peace,
aching to stay lit, aching to release, alive, / hot blood in a jar of ice.” Productive beyond compare,
she established more than thirty convents and monasteries while teaching and writing a sprawling
autobiography—maybe the first Western woman to write this way.
My Teresa poem came back from Paris Review with a form rejection slip on which poetry
editor Jonathan Galassi had written: “I found ‘St. Teresa’ impressive and would like to see more
work from you.” He made a few suggestions on the poem typescript and added, “Is this finished?” I
made the changes and sent back the poem with a few others—but he didn’t take anything. It was a
big step for me, though, to get the attention of an elite editor. I was twenty-six years old.
St. Therese of France. One early winter morning, I went downstairs to the lower level of the
townhouse on a former ski hill in Amesbury, Mass., where I live with my wife Rosemary, to get a
better look at two deer grazing in the rain on the slope shorn of its brushy summer plenitude. Mild
air had melted the snow cover to give the animals a clean shot at the still-green scrubby grass and
Résonance, Vol. 2 [2020], Art. 7