Chapel


I.
Sunday night chapel felt like a death,
that six o'clock pre-darkness worse
than lights out, the weekend ending
with chills and a sermon, our hastily
showered hair freezing on the walk up,
our rubber boots trudging under woolen coats
with the slow gait of a funeral procession.
The chaplain retired after sophomore year.    
We got a young theology student
from Harvard who played Bob Marley
on guitar instead of making us sing hymns,
words drifting ethereally above our wet lonely heads.
In the pews we dripped with lazy disinterest,
the most homesick then, and the most displaced,
feeling almost nothing we were supposed to feel --
only impatience, our toes numb,
the untimely clanking of the heat drowning
out the guitar with almost-comic discord.
Most of us stared at the plaqued walls,
the in memoriams of dead Miltonians,
a boy who drowned before senior year,
three brothers killed in World War II.
Some of us scribbled swears in the hymnals
with a half-hearted conviction.

II.
My first boyfriend was the Dean's son.
On the night before the first snowfall
of the year, the sky heavy with anticipation,
he kissed me quickly on the front steps of my dorm.
He disappeared into the dark before I opened my eyes.
In house meetings we chanted the handbook rules
about having boys in our rooms --
Parietals are for social privacy NOT sexual intimacy --
rolling our eyes with snickering exasperation.
Three feet on the floor and a shoe in the door,
that sneaker jutting into the hallway like a scarlet letter,
a shameless exposure of our shaky girlhood.
One night it was too cold outside to kiss,
the Dean's son's mittened hands scratching my skin,
so he took me to the chapel, upstairs
in the choir loft where I'd never been before,
though he had -- I could tell from the way
he maneuvered me so deftly behind the organ pipes.
Our kissing breath smelled of spearmint gum
and we moved quietly on the floor amidst chair legs,
our bodies brushing against lost sheet music,
the radiators clanking in a rhythm not unlike our own.
In boarding school you're always guilty,
lies mounting up so that you almost
lose track, some rule always being broken.
But the way we blended in so well up there, fallen
and desperate against each other, it seemed as if
we had found a bit of religion, a half hour stolen
before check-in, warm and private and out of breath,
where we were sinless for a moment, and half-reborn.


Nina Riggs