Raspercecious was a word invented 
by our ruddy-faced tenth-grade catechist, 
an ex-Marine turned priest who picked 
one student per section to comprise
his ragtag team of beadles, named 
for medieval university lackeys,
official ass-kissers, aides
to pass out his pop quizzes, to shoot
up the first hand during his oral
inquisitions on Church law, lonely
boys who collected papers and clapped 
erasers behind the gym after class,
mouse-boys who sometimes joined
this man on his camping trips, sliding 
their sleeping bags into the open tailgate
of his green Ford F-150 pickup, 
the one with the camper in its bed,
the only vehicle in the Jesuit lot
with a sticker of a sportfish 
breaching the water after a fly 
reeled in by the man’s man 
in hip waders near the cutbank, 
the only vehicle, it’s come out,
owned by a pedophile, one who laid
at least one suicidal beadle in his creel,
gasping for air in the wet wicker,
who left a generation of alumni
to open the announcing mea culpa
email with little surprise, one of whom,
me, untouched, recalled (there in the moonglow 
of my laptop screen) how that word
raspercecious hissed across his lips,
and wondered whether (to him) it meant fallen
or just indelible, a cassocked snake
staining the riverside grass, trying
to remember what he’d taught me
made a sin mortal, the sinner hell-bound,
knowing, in the eraser-clap cloud
of my mid-life soul, this must be it.

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