In 1945, Fawn McKay Brodie’s biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History, was published by Knopf. The book received critical acclaim, establishing Brodie’s career as a biographer.
Nevertheless, the biggest natural market for a scholarly bio of the Prophet, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was much more restrained.
At the end of the street lies the sky
dressed in the purple magician’s robe
of eventide and the winter storm.
Tonight she sculpts stairs of ice and
Spring has come to old Nippon!
Standing on a hill I see
Verdant valleys neatly sown,
Stepped and terraced, and a bee
Lying on the table,
he was as handsome
as the day he had taken her
through the veil.
Her body was cold, nearly
frigid in the room
set aside for such matters.
When dawn comes this early,
a slice of sky visible from my bed
textures waking. Today’s thin layers clabber
white . . .
A day of long-walked silences,
waterless red gullies and hard-rock
plateaus. We’ve met few on the trails
this summer past my father’s dying.
In the dim green
I can’t tell what I’m remembering,
or what’s been handed down. . . .
A cold spell
for my desecration
slipped upward from your grave.
Spring again.
The browns, the ochre,
the brittle death of fall and winter
recast in transcendent greens—
vibrant, transparent, resurgent.