Original Fire (8 page)

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.

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.