In Boxcar Poetry Review’s May 2008 issue, Derek Henderson’s “The Road Along St. Jude’s” stands out for its development and defense of mystery. The poem begins with and builds on a mystery the mystery of what emerges “[o]ut of my lungs” and then travels over “backroad and gravel”. With the patron saint of lost causes in the title, this reader at least can imagine heavy phlegm or the blood brought up by that once-poetic killer we now call tuberculosis or by the vulgarly familiar TB but the strength of the title’s suggestion of travel also creates the idea of a person emerging from the lungs, perhaps in fact the speaker.

Dwelling in this mystery with the reader along for the ride (whether kicking and screaming or enjoying the vicarious negative capability depends, of course, on the individual’s preferences) Henderson writes the erstwhile lung-dweller to “Crossed curves” that it perhaps travels “over”. The nature of these crossed curves themselves is uncertain. They could be roads that turn away from an intersection rather than continuing straight, or perhaps “Crossed” should be taken as a verb. Though this seems unlikely given the tenses of other verbs in the poem, the first-time reader will not see any of these until after the nearby comma, so it remains a reasonable possibility for at least half a breath. Another possibility picks up the religious theme of the title: the phrase could describe a Celtic cross.

This possibility connects the first stanza with the last:

You want to paint my
God that leavens the tree
Failing—again, falling—into a church

God leavening the tree suggests growth but also draws in echoes of the Passover holiday when (human-made) leavening is not allowed, while the last line suggests the felix culpa: the Church only exists because of original sin, and falling into a church brings up all sorts of redemption narratives. A Latin phrase may conjure up associations with the Roman Catholic Church, though this effect will be at least mitigated for readers who recognize its origin in Horace. Indeed, this problematic religiosity supports a reading of the final stanza as a protest against those who want to paint God, and by extension, the mystery the poem begins with in any particular concrete way.

The middle stanzas also substantiate this meaning as phrases and incomplete unpunctuated sentences suggest heteroglossia. This part of the poem appeals less to me, however, as it seems only to provide a supported resting place for the mystery rather than building and defending it.