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.
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.
Then the cup was made fast
to the body of the tree,
bound with the silver excrescence of the spider,
and the eggs, four in number,
ale gold and trembling,
curved in a thimble of down.
The hinged beak sprang open, tongue erect,
screaming to be fed
before the rest of the hatchling emerged.
I did not eat. I smashed bread to crumbs upon the sill
for the parents were weary as God is weary.
We have the least mercy on the one
who created us,
who introduced us to this hunger.
The smallest mouth starved and the mother
swept it out like rubbish with her wing.
I found it that dawn, after lauds,
already melting into the heat of the flagstone,
a transparent teaspoon of flesh,
the tiny beak shut, the eyes still sealed
within a membrane of the clearest blue.
I buried the chick in a box of leaves.
The rest grew fat and clamorous.
I put my hands through the thorns one night and felt the bowl,
the small brown begging bowl,
waiting to be filled.
By morning, the strands of the nest disappear
into each other, shaping
an emptiness within me that I make lovely
as the immature birds make the air
by defining the tunnels and the spirals
of the new sustenance. And then,
no longer hindered by the violence of their need,
they take to other trees, fling themselves
deep into the world.
4 Agnes
When you entered the church at Basia
holding the scepter of the almond’s
white branch, and when you struck
the bedrock floor, how was I to know
the prayer would be answered?
I heard the drum of hooves long in the distance,
and I held my forehead to the stone of the altar.
I asked for nothing. It is almost
impossible to ask for nothing.
I have spent my whole life trying.
I know you felt it, when his love spilled.
That ponderous light.
From then on you endured
happiness, the barge you pulled
as I pull mine. This
is called density of purpose.
As you learned, you must shed everything else
in order to bear it.
That is why, toward the end of your life
when at last there was nothing I could not relinquish,
I allowed you to spring forward without me.
Sister, I unchained myself. For I was always
the heaviest passenger,
the stone wagon of example,
the freight you dragged all the way to heaven,
and how were you to release yourself
from me, then, poor mad horse,
except by reaching the gate?
I wash your ankles
with my tears. Unhem
my sweep of hair
and burnish the arch of your foot.
Still your voice cracks
above me.
I cut off my hair and toss it across your pillow.
A dark towel
like the one after sex.
I’m walking out,
my face a dustpan,
my body stiff as a new broom.
I will drive boys
to smash empty bottles on their brows.
I will pull them right out of their skins.
It is the old way that girls
get even with their fathers—
by wrecking their bodies on other men.
He was formed of chicken blood and lightning.
He was what fell out when the jug tipped.
He was waiting at the bottom
of the cliff when the swine plunged over.
He tore out their lungs with a sound like ripping silk.
He hacked the pink carcasses apart, so that the ribs spread
like a terrible butterfly, and there was darkness.
It was he who turned the handle and let the dogs
rush from the basements. He shoved the crust
of a volcano into his roaring mouth.
He showed one empty hand. The other gripped
a crowbar, a monkey wrench, a crop
which was the tail of the ass that bore them to Egypt,
one in each saddlebag, sucking twists
of honeyed goatskin, arguing
already over a woman’s breasts.
He understood the prayers that rose
in every language, for he had split the human tongue.
He was not the Devil nor among the Fallen—
it was just that he was clumsy, and curious,
and liked to play with knives. He was the dove
hypnotized by boredom and betrayed by light.
He was the pearl in the mouth, the tangible
emptiness that saints seek at the center of their prayers.
He leaped into a shadow when the massive stone
rolled across the entrance, sealing him with his brother
in the dark as in the beginning.
Only this time he emerged first, bearing the self-inflicted wound, both brass halos
tacked to the back of his skull.
He raised two crooked fingers; the extra die
tumbled from his lips when he preached
but no one noticed. They were too busy
clawing at the hem of his robe and planning
how to sell him to the world.
Who rips his own flesh down the seams and steps
forth flourishing the ax,
who chops down his own cross,
who straddles it,
who stares like a cat,
whose cheeks are the gouged blue of science,
whose torso springs out of wrung cloth
blazing ocher, blazing rust, whose blood
cools to black marble in his fist,
who makes his father kneel,
who makes his father say,
“You want her? Take her.”
Who rolls the stone from the entrance over his mother,
who pulls her veil out from under it,
who ties the stained cloth around his hips
and starts out,
walking toward Jerusalem
where they are gathering in his name.
When the rain began to fall, he rolled back
into the clouds and slept again.
Still it persisted, beating at every surface,
until it entered his body
as the sound of prolonged
human weeping.
So he was broken.
His first tears dissolved
the mask of white stone.
As they traveled through the bones of his arms,
his strength became a mortal strength,
subject to love.
On earth, when he heard the first rain
tap through the olive leaves,
he opened his eyes and stared at his mother.
As his father, who had made the sacrifice,
stood motionless in heaven,
his son cried out to him:
I want no shelter, I deny
the whole configuration
.
I hate the weight of earth
.
I hate the sound of water
.
Ash to ash, you say, but I know different
.
I will not stop burning
.
Our Lady of the Buffalo Bones, pray for us.
Our Lady of the bales of skins and rotting hulks
from which our tongues alone were taken,
pray for us, Our Lady of the Poisoned Meat
and of the wolves who ate
and whose tongues swelled until they burst.
Our Lady of the Eagles Dropping from the Sky,
Our Lady of the Sick Fox and of the Lurching Hawk
and of the hunters at the edge of Yellowstone Park waiting
to rain thunder on the last of us.
Pray for us, Our Lady of Polaris.
Our Lady of the Sleek Skidoo.
Our Lady of Destruction Everywhere
Our bones were ground into fertilizer
for the worn-out eastern earth.
Our bones were burned to charcoal
to process sugar and to make glue
for the shoe soles of your nuns and priests.
Our Lady of the Testicle Tobacco Pouch
Our Lady of the Box Cars of Skulls,
pray for us whose bones have nourished
the ordered cornfields that have replaced
the random grass
which fed and nurtured and gave us life.
Let us now pray to those beatified
within the Holy Colonial church
beginning with Saint Assimilus,
patron of residential and of government
boarding schools, whose skin was dark
but who miraculously bled white milk
for all to drink.
To cure the gut aches that resulted
as ninety percent of Native children are
lactose intolerant, let us now pray to the
patron saint of the Indian Health Service,
who is also guardian of slot machines,
Our Lady of Luck, she who carries
in one hand mistaken blood tests and botched
surgeries and in the other hand the heart
of a courageous doctor squeezed dry.
Let us pray for the sacred hearts of all good doctors
and nurses, whose tasks are manifold and made more difficult
by the twin saints of commodity food,
Saint Bloatinus and Saint Cholestrus,
who were martyred at the stake of body fat
and who preside now in heaven
at the gates of the Grand Casino Buffet.
Saint Macaronia and Saint Diabeta, hear our prayer.
It is terrible to be diminished toe by toe.
Good Saint Pyromane,
Enemy of the BIA,
Deliver us from those who seek to bury us
in files and triplicate documents and directives.
Saint Quantum, Martyr of Blood
and Holy Protector of the Tribal Rolls,
assist us in the final shredding which shall proceed
on the Day of Judgment so we may all rain down
in a blizzard of bum pull tabs
and unchosen lottery tickets, which represent
the souls of the faithfully departed
in your name.
Your name written in the original fire
we mistook so long ago for trader’s rum.
Pray for us, all you saints of white port
four roses old granddad and night train.
Good Saint Bingeous who fell asleep upside down on the cross
and rose on the third day without even knowing he had died.
Saint Odium of the hundred-proof blood
and Saint Tremens of the great pagan spiders
dripping from the light fixtures.
You powerful triumvirate, intercede for us
drunks stalled in the bars,
float our asses off the cracked stools
and over to the tribal college,
where the true saints are ready to sacrifice their brain cells
for our brain cells, in that holy exchange which is called learning.
Saint Microcephalia, patron of huffers and dusters,
you of the cooked brain and mean capacity, you
of the simian palm line and poor impulse control,
you of the Lysol-soaked bread, you sleeping with the dogs
underneath the house, hear our prayers
which we utter backwards and sideways
as nothing makes sense
least of all your Abstinence Campaign
from which Oh Lord Deliver Us.
Saints Primapara, Gravida, and Humpenenabackseat,
you patrons of unsafe teenage sex
and fourteen-year-old mothers,
pray for us now and at the hour of our birth,
amen.