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Saint Francis On A Dark Day
One can tell a bird by its feathers.
i.
Air dark as an oiled flute
a brown wood room with a flame burning
St Francis
in the library on a sombre day.
We put things to our own use:
the
bruise.
He turns
on a dais
on a ruin-colored noon.
Eyes incandescent. Conversation
weaving back & forth between him & me like two at a shuttle:
The cloth above our shimmering, shivering
Saint Vitus-dance
bluegray. Does he compose canticles at a right angle to all others?
I got married in worsted.
Illness often a goad to spirituality
The capstone of boyhood-
girlhood for me or was I really a boy?
My twelfth summer.
Icarian, I flew too near the sun & bore a shoulder-scar.
Young St Francis in his youth
longed for lustre, glory
all which he later despised.
Both he and I had a dream
only possible in the Middle Ages:
Sapphires, rubies, caskets, a library in jewel colors, illuminated manuscripts
Then the metallic black of crows' wings
took light
large recurring glance
of
off-radiance.
A lung-clash frail boy with illness of the lungs
a strong girl
with
affliction of the central nervous system.
*
Here on earth life is torture.
He went toward lepers
whose faces were an open sore
& kissed them.
When I was twelve
folk stopped mother to say
have her eat
off the roots
off the ground
bathe her in dirty dishwater:
that was down
south.
A Christian Science Practitioner
took me under her wing
(for bucks.) Said Today's the day you'll have your demonstration.
Thirteen,
an imaginative girl
I worked myself into a frenzy focusing on walking again.
ii.
Today
rainy
people stopping me wheeling up the glassy pavement
Don't' you want an umbrella?
What vivid stockings.:
Flashy as a tart I can stop traffic with them.
Struggling down a bank ramp
another friend?
called out, I have my surgery on the 22nd.
Good luck
I flung over my shoulder
like confetti at a wedding. Only I'd use birdseed.
I imagined
pale birds
fluttering from their prison bars to his hand.
Of Assisi
he returned
clothier's son
who stole all the clothing.
I steal
borrow
all the wit I can
knowing good poets do not borrow
but steal
yet arrive home
to more crybabies;
My Avon catalogue was stolen.
I have a splitting headache from the perfume.
Lucky enough to have perfume light
bathe a town
she is
I close the door my wheels & gloves dripping like wet feathers
to the bath. Tears.
iii.
The story is no childish fable
but appeals
to the simple.
John of Gaunt's mistress' was Kathryn Swynford.
Redhaired largbeasted
Francis'
passion
was the lord
after a cocky
boyhood
in which his charms, midsize were winning
but his eyes
were incendiary.
As for me,
I too harbored
an unearthly joy.
Do I truly believe I am Emily
reincarnated?
Garbed
in puritan gray?
Yes.
Most days.
But how can I say
a word
about what's holy
without tainting it?
I love those
who read me
yet still are hungry.
I would not turn
a page
quickly
nor turn
a wren
away
St Francis
St Francis
(did I not pray during treatments
on plinths
being ambulanced from hospital to hospital
on a gurney
like lighting
candle after candle
heart-surgery after heart-surgery?)
Time for a nap:
lie on a scaffold like Michelangelo
under the ceiling.
In this single dark room with a flame burning
library with speckled books like fawns
on a dark day-Be with me.
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