On the morning table,
beside his breakfast of coffee and buttered bread:
a packet of nine holy cards, enluminures
wrapped in light blue tissue.
Eight to exchange with his
First Communion classmates,
the last to keep, with a mother’s
hope-filled blessing. Serious, brief.
Memento, bookmark, portable prayer.
On the verso his name, the date, a truncated beatitude.
On the recto an image,
most often of a kneeling communicant,
tongue out for the descending host.
That love might land, be swallowed toothlessly and whole.
The rarer collectibles, featuring palm trees
and ancient tortures,
a world being beaten into gold,
the imperial standards not yet fallen but doomed already.
An anchor around the neck of a naked man,
pitched headlong from a too-small trireme.
And Diocletian’s wife,
admonishing gentle hand
upon his glittering scabbard.
Not every saint was a martyr
but every martyr was surely a saint.
***
Madrid was full of saints, as was Rome, as were many places they supposed among themselves before the big map of Christian Europe. They passed around the picture of one such, entombed behind glass in the aisle of a double-altared galleon-wide church, Santa Octavia Pilar Josefina de Caridad y Fe. A sudden rush of rot about the pious roses crowding the reception room of proud, wary parents and bored siblings, the elderly priest dabbing red wine from the corners of his mouth, a scrabble of unconfessed youngsters grabbing for the custard-seamed napoleons, symmetrical chocolate veins on a thin white coat, row by row upon their silver trays. Some of the celebrated children laughed as though nothing at all had changed, some few others closed their eyes and saw. Octavia’s small body, skin painted on and blackening or yellowing according to season, needle and thread at intervals to hide where the shrunken insides had been stuffed with straw.
***
And Magdalene, the beautiful whore,
reformed by, beloved of Jesus,
said to have died in what was now Marseilles.
Marseilles, a French city, if barely,
somewhat whorish itself,
busy and loud in its thin dress
beside the churr and dolphinate Mediterranean.
The other Mary, the perpetually
fifteen-year old Mother of God,
extraordinary virgin,
epithets like a bridal train
that made poetry out of prayer.
Star of the sea / bright Star of the sea
murmuring along the shoreline,
peering into the gusting sideways rain
with eyes shielded,
the battlefield of scuds and swells
and deck-splintering lightening.
Light a candle and disregard
what choked the straining sailors,
be it sea monsters or Lutheran pirates.
Every poem was a prayer, but not every prayer was poetry.
***
The dream of Paradise on Earth
had fountained up its own saints,
though no one took to them the ghostly
confidence of broken commandments, broken hearts.
And like the saints of the Church,
these heroes and heroines
numbered their share of fictions,
to rival the holy martyrs in popularity.
The little drummer or bugle boy,
the lass in the red cap,
eyes like Rebekah or Catherine.
Sabered, piked, shot to death.
Twelve-year olds, bleeding out
for the newborn secular order.
***
Without word, without image,
what then remained of the catechism?
What was the ineffable debris?
Which orts found their way from memory to dream?
As the priest washed his hands, and dried them,
what cloud shape stained the window,
changed the meaning of the altar?
A trove, a hoard to lay up for a skint season.
These words and images, like nuts in a winter’s barrow.
To speak of the lily’s thoughtless drooping mouth,
to speculate whether it was not deserving
of at least one hot tear, one waxen drop?
Without the book itself one quite forgets.
Do the others provide the tale of the foolish virgins,
or is it Matthew alone?
Life nourished inspiration
and what might follow, word and deed.
Experience pulled the curtain down
and found a pale fantasy.
One might well hunger, crucified
between twin tigers,
killers of, eaters of, the future.
That one of these was closer to a world
of tranquility, of normality even,
possible, yes, and therefore the more evil
and unnatural of the two,
for thus descending from sunlight to lamplight.
***
Candles stood against the lit lamp, shivered their magic, their seductions and marvelous claims. A battalion of flames, cupped in red glass, a soul could buoy itself on such a bed of restless heat, pricked from the slumbering remorse to busy itself and rise (humbly, ever so, looking back at the first upon its thousand fellows and far below, however other-dimensioned, upon the living who knelt and prayed with such neurotic consistency and lit those same and efficacious wicks and then, rotating 180 degrees, upwards, to that pale everlasting) till its rising had lifted it clear of the urbs, the ex-urbs, the suburbs of LIMBO
An inventive solution, often derided for its logical inelegance, although the arithmetic would come right by world’s end.
As mysteries went, missionaries might well sigh. There was, after all, that exit from the grave, that business of the still-hymened womb fruited by a whisper, the Janus-plus-one of the Godhead itself.
Best to mention that shadowy stopping-place only when the proselytizer’s hook was well fleshed, thus avoiding complications and possible hilarity.
LIMBO, where are warehoused the souls of the just who died before the coming of Jesus Christ, along with a nursery of infants unbaptized when life left them. The good and the pure, an instance of paradise barged oddly in a polluted district. Pagans saved by their ignorance, God arriving after the curtain had already gone up.
***
To the four elements of air, water,
fire, and earth, add the fifth,
the solid matter of sin.
In contemplating the rules of the place
common sense was the quickest gateway to heresy.
Tread lightly, for mystery is literal.
A sense of humor, a heightened sense
of the ridiculous would stand one in divine good stead.
As for the alchemist (already stirring
in the starch of his Sunday best),
a sixth element presents itself.
One palisade left to leap.
With fear as guardian,
the little white-faced gnome with its lion’s roar,
strutting from tarry sconce to sconce.
And fear was always the adjunct
to a well-rounded education.
Knowledge was not the globe
but the circling satellite,
with leisure, and vantage,
and a ticking clock one could choose to ignore.
Well on his way, head filled
with the metrics for terra brown and
mountain gray and ocean’s
endlessly shifting palette.