{"id":909,"date":"2012-10-17T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-10-17T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/?p=909"},"modified":"2022-08-03T13:16:56","modified_gmt":"2022-08-03T17:16:56","slug":"bullshot-marcus-speh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/fiction\/bullshot-marcus-speh\/","title":{"rendered":"BULLshot: Marcus Speh"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>JH:<\/strong> For me, the best, most engaging part of this poet&#8217;s obit is the &#8220;prayer.&#8221; What do you pray for, if at all, and how?<\/p>\n<p><strong>FF: <\/strong>Here is my earnest prayer:<\/p>\n<p><em>Unholy Father, your life echoes and re-echoes in the cave that I\u2019ve hollowed out. So close to your death, so close to my ground, I feel feverish still and fertile also: from your departure springs my solitude and a new life. As a writer, a solitary shapeshifter, I pick a wordish gestalt for this new life. Whatever I build with my own hands, your hands guide me. Whichever image I hold in my heart is underlaid with your image. You were a Joycean \u2018fellow of the right kidney\u2019, and I\u2019m what\u2019s left of you. <\/em>(I stop, breathing hard now.)<\/p>\n<p>This obituary, in which I allowed myself literary liberties that my father, himself a writer, would have, I am sure, most fervently approved of, is a prayful encounter with him and with myself. A pleading, an expression of intense yearning full of ambivalence: \u201cPray, let me be like you\u201d and: \u201cPray, don\u2019t make me be like you.\u201d When I look around me, I can already see the shadow of my invocation in my own child\u2019s eyes.<\/p>\n<p>Where all this will lead, if prayer is meaningful beyond the moment of imploration, I do not know. My prayer goes up the chimney like thin, curly smoke, mixing with your own prayer, tempting providence, up all the way to the wobbling stars.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The author of this week&#8217;s &#8220;Obituary for a Poet Heretic&#8221; gets on his knees<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10483,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","writer-jarrett-haley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=909"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17659,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909\/revisions\/17659"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}