cry in this body.
I was meant to have your tongue in my mouth.
That is why I stand by your great plaster lips
waiting for your voice to unfold from its dark slot.
Your hand clenched in the shape of a bottle.
Your mouth painted shut on the answer.
Your eyes, two blue mirrors, in which I am perfectly denied.
I open my mouth and I speak
though it is only a thin sound, a leaf
scraping on a leaf.
7 Extreme Unction
When the blue steam stalls over the land
and the resinous apples
turn to mash, then to a cider whose thin
twang shrivels the tongue,
the snakes hatch
twirling from the egg.
In the shattered teacup, from the silvering
boards of the barn,
in the heat of rotting mulch hay,
they soak up the particles of light
so that all winter
welded in the iron sheath
of sludge under the pond
they continue, as we do,
drawing closer to the source,
their hearts beating slower
as the days narrow
until there is this one pale aperture
and the tail sliding through
then the systole, the blackness of heaven.
The Seven Sleepers
Seven Christian youths of Ephesus, according to legend, hid themselves in a cave in A.D. 250 to escape persecution for their faith. They fell asleep in the cave, their youthfulness was miraculously preserved, and they were discovered by accident some two hundred years later. The Seven Sleepers are the patron saints of insomniacs.
Wandering without sleep I looked for God
and found this moment to praise.
Come with me, impossible night.
I am moving bitterly and far away.
Over vast and open country pulsing with dead light,
over the atomic voids
onto the great plains in massed vapor
in the tumble fever of my dreams,
I seek you,
Nameless one. My god, my leaf.
I seek you in the candles of pine and in the long tongue
furled in sleep. I seek you in the August suspension
of leaves as steps of sunlight
tottering through air.
Drunk beneath the overpass at dawn
passed out in a Hefty bag.
On the hills, the tyrant moon,
and in the faces of my daughters,
I seek you driving prayerfully
as a member of the Sacred Heart Driving Club.
I seek you in the headless black wings of the vulture
Motionless dial, my death.
I seek you full of me, as if I could drink you in
and overcome myself.
I seek you under everything
in parallel faults and shifting plates.
Deadened to myself in the morning
and in the flat thumb of day
I seek you balancing the hammer.
I seek you naked, holding red stones,
as I walk beneath the torn sky, toward home,
where I open my throat to the black river
of my fears, all my fears.
You are faceless in the twig cells dividing upward.
Always to the light.
You lie buried with me twenty days and nights
without a candle, breathing through a straw
and the air is sweet, clear, like food.
From our grave, we can smell the leaves and water,
taste sunlight, taste the chemical structure of night.
I seek you, I find you everywhere, in the white day,
and in the relentless throat call
of physical love.
Our bodies in winter, our skin dry as paper,
we are stroking the urgent message
written in the subskin, the rat-brain, subcortex,
written there in lemon juice that heat of touch
turns visible, written in the print
of a child detective.
Dragging a cart of splinters,
tin nailed to the soles of your feet,
you walk over me. You strike flame from my body.
I burn at the magnetic center as the leaves fall
steps of fire
leading down into the earth.
I find you in my newborn child,
harnessed to my breasts with cotton, small and molten.
Her need for me as pure as my need for you.
I find you in the miraculous dung of the horned beetle
which cures the heart of anguish
I find you in the ash I must become melting in the rain,
new rain, descending.
Call me, speak from the water
lit by spilled oils
Sing to me from the mouth of the fish artfully arranged
on smashed ice.
Sing from the empty seas.
Behind us, before us,
in all things now I praise you.
Gold One. Prime Mover. Boring Prima Facie.
I praise you in Jack Daniel’s at the foot of the bed
and in the isolation of this dream.
Thing of holes, thing of lies, thing of shoulder pads,
thing of beautiful smashed mouth
thing of drenched fabric,
thing unmade by woman in her own body:
I fall face down into the sweet slab of cake
into the roaring flesh, licking crumbs off you
Face down in the yard, in the dust of sexual heat.
I praise you.
In the word
and in the void between words.
You are the pause, the synaptic skip.
You are the meaning between the syllables.
Walking up the water drops until I reach the cloud,
Walking up the leaves
until the crown of the tree is massed
like a cloak around me. Following snow
to the place of snow,
of course I praise you,
there is nothing else,
there is no other task.
When I first began listening to your voice I was huge,
I was a child.
I sat in the ash tree as light froze in the sky
and willed you to leave the kitchen.
Then, suddenly, you were around me in the leaves.
I thought there was laughter in the hissing wind
and I was afraid, I saw
my name written on the dark surface.
Gold One. Mother. Boring Prima Facie.
You and I are dust of cellular radiance,
of intricacy and rushing noise.
Hammer of time, hammer of love.
You rise in the bones of my husband.
You fall in the hands of the silver clock.
You fly off the grasses and you seed the water.
I praise you in the old red-brick house of my childhood
crumbling to rose,
to silver, to agate, to sludge.
Black tar. Deep tar. Cozening preserver.
Steep cliff ignited in the halo
as the sun tips its hood of fire.
I praise you in the cicatrix of sex
and the brilliant umbilical happiness
of sleek, heavy snakes
twining and untwining in the grass.
I praise you in my iron shoes,
magnetized and grounding me.
I praise you in my shoes forged of steam,
in my shoes of dripping felt, my shoes of bottle caps,
my garbage shoes, my shoes of wood ash and velvet,
my uncomplaining shoes, my whore’s shoes
that set me above you.
I praise you underneath me, walking,
my reflection in the unreflecting ground,
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moving below me through dirt and ledge.
My twin of the grave.
My death glove. My other.
I praise you in the longing of my infant,
in my children, whom I have brought here to search you out,
who have begun, already, starting with my own face.
God, I have killed you in myself
again, again, dragging you to light by the tail,
I have hammered you to one thin ribbon.
Now I release you!
Blue and coiling in the simple world.
I praise you in the power of these words
to seize your image, to abandon mine.
Every motion of your dance is the dance
of my daily life, and yet you hide yourself.
I praise you in the roaring veil.
How weak I have become walking in my heavy shoes.
You will have to lift me, you will have to be my body.
There is only one perfect love, that between
an infant and its protector.
All else is magical failure.
I sift my thoughts into this perfect zero,
into the silken core between minus and plus.
I walk through the terminal number
backward, into the negative
where deep snow falls.
Again I am a child. I stand in the snow
and all around me is the snow
I stand there until I turn to snow.
And then, for a moment, I know you.
You were made by women.
You were made because we needed someone,
a man, to blame.
You were struck from our hands
and kneaded to your man-shape like dough
Then you rose and rose and doubled to enclose us
in the God-shape, the myth.
Perfect light, manuscript of ions, come toward me.
Advance, shaking, futile.
I remember.
After the rape I went to my chair.
I sat, looking at the carpet.
I felt the angel of forgiveness unfurl her iron wings.
Her feathers ripped through my back like razors
Now, when I close my wings over you—
Know how it is to be a woman,
to fight your way out of the body
only to be cast between the ribs of a man again.
Light of my brain burning day and night,
I praise you as a driver loses the road
in snow and drives across the fields
of snow, the snow absolving human presence.
Star. Failing light. I praise you,
as I’m sitting here, praise you fervently,
and without hope, every day.
The first waves rushed in, immaculate and foaming.
The child was given up to love.
Pressed deeply against the sound of the world,
she breathed the dark spores
of earth, slept underneath the twelve-branched heart.
Let us go down into the earth every night.
Let us bite down,
let us chew the bitter wood to paste
as deer in their winter yards circulate, stripping
everything into themselves
until they drift out,
in spring, wise and ravenous.
I lie down in the grass, watching, and when the coyote turns
her ass to the wind, looks at me across her shoulder,
that is when we regard each other,
as the snow bleeds white around the base of Sweetgrass.
You are everything. There is nowhere
I do not praise you.
In bed, in the body.
You rise toward me in the bones
of my wife, my husband, my lover.
Paging through the white flesh, the black, the brown,
which we wear as we dance the skin dance
Someone please!
Remove my beer-can vest, my skin of vinyl sheet music!
Speak from the water, speak from the fucking.
I praise you in the body out of the body.
Ash I must become in new rain descending.
Child, dear raven’s heart, new messenger.
Hammer of love, hammer of time,
self I’ve killed you in myself,
again, again, dragging you to light by the tail,
pounding you to one thin ribbon.
Now I release you,
blue and coiling in the simple world.
How sad I have become walking in my heavy shoes.
You will have to kill me, you will have to be my body.
Our love like all love is magical failure.
Perfect light, manuscript of ions.
I write your praises
on my own skin
with the stylus of a sharpened nail.
I wake in the blue hours once again,
my whole life spilling through me,
as loons pour
the cold green tea of their laughter
across the rose-slabbed lakes of Ontario.
I am one thing. I am nothing you can name.
I pray in the woods, begging to be taken,
the way leaves and stones are
whirled into your rushing mouth.
River of snow, river of twinned carp,
Sky of three holes, sky of white paper.
I praise you the way shadows
of deer move beyond the cut lawn
stripping everything into them, flowers, bark,
the frail blossoms of the poke, the weeds,
yew trees, cedar, lythrum, tender new labia of phlox.
Shadow of my need, shadow of hunger,
shadow infinite and made of gesture,
my god, my leaf,
graceful, ravenous, moving in endless circles
as the sweet seeds hang waxen yellow in the maple.
Avila
Teresa of Avila’s brother, Rodrigo, emigrated to America in 1535 and died in a fight with Natives on the banks of the Rio de la Plata.
—Footnote to The Life of Teresa of Jesus, translated and edited by E. Allison Peers
Sister, do you remember our cave of stones,
how we entered from the white heat of afternoons,
chewed seeds, and plotted one martyrdom
more cruel than the last?
You threw your brown hair back
and sang Pax Vobiscum to the imaginary guard,
a leopard on the barge of Ignatius.
Now I see you walking toward me, discalced like the poor,
as the dogwood trees come into blossom.
Their centers are the wounds of nails,
deep and ragged. The spears of heaven
bristle along the path you take,
turning me aside.
Dear sister, as the mountain grows out of the air,
as the well of fresh water
is sunk in the grinding sea,
as the castle within rises stone upon stone,
I still love you. But that is only
the love of a brother for a sister, after all,
and God has nothing to do with it.
Saint Clare
She refused to marry when she was twelve and was so impressed by a Lenten sermon of Saint Francis in 1212 that she ran away from her home in Assisi, received her habit, and took the vow of absolute poverty. Since Francis did not yet have a convent for women, he placed her in the Benedictine convent near Basia, where she was joined by her younger sister, Agnes. Her father sent twelve armed men to bring Agnes back, but Clare’s prayers rendered her so heavy they were unable to budge her.
—John H. Delaney,
Pocket Dictionary of Saints
1 The Call
First I heard the voice throbbing across the river.
I saw the white phosphorescence of his robe.
As he stepped from the boat, as he walked
there spread from each
footfall a black ripple,
from each widening ring a wave,
from the waves a sea that covered the moon.
So I was seized in total night
and I abandoned myself in his garment
like a fish in a net. The slip knots
tightened on me and I rolled
until the sudden cry hauled me out.
Then this new element, a furnace of mirrors,
in which I watch myself burn.
The scales of my old body melt away like coins,
for I was rich, once, and my father
had already chosen my husband.
2 Before
I kept my silver rings in a box of porphyrite.
I ate salt on bread. I could sew.
I could mend the petals of a rose.
My nipples were pink, my sister’s brown.
In the fall we filled our wide skirts with walnuts
for our mother to crack with a wooden hammer.
She put the whorled meats into our mouths,
closed our lips with her finger
and said Hush. So we slept
and woke to find our bodies arching into bloom.
It happened to me first,
the stain on the linen, the ceremonial
seal which was Eve’s fault.
In the church at Assisi I prayed. I listened
to Brother Francis and I took his vow.
The embroidered decorations at my bodice
turned real, turned to butterflies and were dispersed.
The girdle of green silk, the gift from my father
slithered from me like a vine,
so I was something else that grew from air,
and I was light, the skeins of hair
that my mother had divided with a comb of ivory
were cut from my head and parceled to the nesting birds.
3 My Life as a Saint
I still have the nest, now empty,
woven of my hair, of the hollow grass,
and silken tassels at the ends of seeds.
From the window where I prayed,
I saw the house wrens gather
dark filaments from air
in the shuttles of their beaks.