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Ordinary Time ISBN: 978-0-9740701-9-3 $14.00 Order from: Spire Press, Inc. 532 LaGuardia Place, Suite 298, New York, NY 10012 tel: 646.736.7701 email: info@spirepress.org Bookstore purchase orders may be faxed to 866.228.4691

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Daughters of the Divine Redeemer

At the end of the school year,
Sister reminded us to bring
buckets and scouring pads
so that we could wash the legs
of our desks and chairs.
We took this final
assignment to heart, sinking
our arms up to our elbows
in water, frothing each leg
to a pink or blue convulsion,
depending on which brand
our mothers bought, Brillo or
SOS, that matched Mary's
garments, watching over us
from her corner plinth
as she crushed the snake's head.
And when Sister turned
her back or left the room,
we slathered each other in suds,
sixty-five fourth graders
laughing at the joy of freedom
so close at hand. Even Jesus,
bloodied on his cross above
the cursive alphabet seemed
lighter, the nails that ripped his
hands and feet lessening their grip.
When we turned our backs on
the agony of learning, the metal
legs on the chairs upended on
every desk shone like moonlight
on a still lake. Our hair sticky,
our clothes drenched, our faces,
arms and legs smudged
with gray steel wool suds,
we walked home swinging
our empty buckets in the air.

Sacramental

At dusk, the angel beside the lake
casts off the burden of shine.
Lily pads cushion the fall, pillow the light.
The odor of mud usurps the odor of sanctity.
Night coming on, the cry of cicadas thickens.
Dreams will follow, dark
as the hummingbird's torpor,
heart nearly stopped when wings come to rest.

Our canoe parts the water, ripples
brief as kisses along the shore.
Stone angel, pity of perfection,
we welcome the fall
into animal sadness, nights so long
the ache of them beats beside us, a second heart.
And nights that pass quickly, too, that we never forget.
Memory's the heavy, beautiful stone we carry
like a scapular around our neck.

Indiana Woman Builds a Fish Barn

It was as if she had been there when the continents
formed, had known before knowing
that the ground she walked on was once equatorial
and submerged. That radiolaria, diatoms, brachiopods,
and bryozoa had filtered the waters for their food.
That mollusks moved on muscled feet or darted
in spumes of silt and sand. That crinoid stalks
had been there too, undulating on the seafloor.
Then organisms with neural tubes, notochords,
and gill slits. And, finally, Osteichthyes,
predecessors of the very creatures for which
she set out to build this structure.

But when she began, she wasn't thinking these things.
She was thinking architecture: walls plumb and
cupolas round. Slope of shingles above clerestory.
She was treading the waters of afternoons
in those giant enclosures, cathedrals
of grain, hay, horse dung, and groaning cattle.
Shadows rotating about thick shafts of daylight,
sundials marking the hours from dawn till dusk.
The lantern tilted on a stump or hung from a shoeing nail
while her father, back soaked in sweat, dragged a foal
from a blood-warm, watery world into this one,
veil of dust hanging in the air as he worked.

And so, it became a joining of worlds, a fusion
of time and matter. Childhood fancy and
Midwestern practical. Fields and farms loosed
from their moorings, the remnants of memory
and old cataclysmic splendors: contingencies and
a past that might have been, a barn full of fish.

 

 

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