St. Francis, and: Arctic Palimpsest, and: Nocturne at Midnight

Abstract

St. Francis, and: Arctic Palimpsest, and: Nocturne at Midnight Mary Lee (bio) In my dreams, St. Francisspeaks in the field of me, and his sparrows gather nearto listen. St. Francis of pain’s unfadingcenter, what brightly hums as a thrummed pulse of bees,I know how it turns a mouth silent. Muted,the mouth’s O most adjacent to the blottediris-ring found on poppies. The aperture of lack’s taste,language made inadequate. Is it true that there is a soundto speech leaving you. To be still and knowthe morning with its choir of trees alive in me, hiddenbetween grasses, lilies, wordless stones in the passingof hours as somewhere I can hear the face of the impossible moonfalling clear over pools of water. [End Page 37] Arctic Palimpsest When God painted my doe face,he must have added a dab of rougeand a streak of oblivion. How could Ihave known the exact shape of my lifeobscured by leaves, capable as any eye’s flicker?In the forest, I was another absence—a doe wanting to turn real in the shade,always a little lost in the landscape.My breath left no consequence in the air.Despair was the larger animal I couldn’t see,readying awake while I remained sleeping.And when despair, the animal, rearedits restless head—a remnant of its kisslike a thorn lodged into the side of my flesh.Then I saw what seemed like the wrist of God,his back retreating into the shadows,and briefly, the light was a stillness in medrawn over the face of the world. ________ In the mind of a doe, more and more snow.Across endless snow, a mind blank to fill.Sometimes it beckons and withoutquestion I follow its uncertain forms—like the footprints of a doe leading me furtherand further out across snow until I am the snow.Or were the footprints my own? Was I the doewith a mind sewn closed by the cold,unable to see the cold as separatefrom myself? Sometimes in the privacyof my own sadness I feel like a thing hunted.Sometimes when I imagine the sadness,I think the sadness imagines me. [End Page 38] ________ The deer are braver in the cold than youcould ever be, their hooves kissing the whitelandscape in a lattice. Alreadythe fresh snow comes to fill those markswhere their weight pressed in. You can imaginetheir deer lungs calming as they watch the sundisappear inside the growing dark,their heads nodding awake at dawn,ears twitching as the hares stiramong the nearby grasses. Some of the deer,startled, bound past the trees,their glassy eyes quivering,traces of a dream. And the ones fallen over,sides opened and ears splayedon the ground, their blood spilling outas they listen to ice expanding below,loud cracks echoing like the soundof a troop of whales coming to save them—Their breath hangs there for a while.You can almost see it there still. [End Page 39] Nocturne at Midnight Maybe a stone had pierced the glass, a boy’s stoneof hatred or love puncturing the window in an ordinary arc—Or maybe the sharp end of a nearby branchhad been driven into the glass during a storm,fractures spreading out like veinsaround the point where it struck. Whatever it wasmade no difference. There was the windowwith a hole the size of her eye that might fit a key,a small opening for her to peer through, to see,on the other side, the yard’s lengthening shadows.Only night, that dark pitch of wine, like some brutalsweetness filling one’s animal mouth in a thicketof blackberries. As if, in the middle of the night, too muchpours into the mind, assembles as a nocturne of starlings—But there was light, wasn’t there? There was a candleheld up against the panes, and her mind to transformthe overwhelm of night. To imagine night blossomingalong the bare arms of trees that could...