The Saints of the Old Places

The Saints of the Old Places

Their calls grate

like shears cutting heavy tin.

Misfits among robins and wrens,

they flock to this street,

stolid as midwives on their rounds.

I receive their song in my ruined life

like scalding water in a new wound.

I walk on, redeemed.

                                                The Crows of Mica Street

                                                Jo McDougal

I hear it sometimes in the spines of old books

like I’m opening a door quietly and have to

because I haven’t been there in a number

of years and because what’s waiting

on the other side has been as patient as

a plaster saint and I’m afraid

to see how far it’s been left to flake

in paint and clay and heat and cold of

their being let go, how over and over (years

ago) I’d rove the low nose on Joseph, it’s line

straight to the dewy lilies (some flick in the balcony

light) straight to the toe poking through the stone

hem of his robe.  I noticed too how they’d loaded

St. Patrick onto the backs of some come lately

pallbearers and now he’s at the entrance

door where I have to pass my hand her shadow

over the heads of the snakes glued and refusing

to leave the beginning of the plinth.  I was a kid

when he was hid in the confessional, a room

as big as the sacristy for the balance of an imagined

apse and before I could walk down the aisle

at the start of mass I’d have to gather my alb

and slide behind the black velvet to clasp

the processional crucifix where I practiced

my straight lines and my acute and obtuse

angles along the brass effigy, the green tarnish,

what’s it called?  verdigris? dripping (not really

but it seemed to me) down the handle that looked

so much like the handle of my father’s barn broom

I laughed at the irony of how some wood ends up

shoved into a sort of monstrance and how some

always comes upon the shit end of it all.  That Patrick

would stare and stare, all ears and dented eyes

and depending on which mass, four o’clock winter

Saturday afternoons were particularly dim,

he’d seem (but it was only the lack of heat

and the clang/bang in the cast iron radiators)

near to ready to step off and give me a lift of the chain

and hinge holding the crucifix pinned to the doorframe. 

Believe me when I say this little out of the way place

is not immune to the blacker, pitchier instincts of people,

men and women and kids confessing to a tired priest,

his free hand on his knee, his other tucked up under

his chin to keep from going sour against mistresses with

bruised lips (he sees them close up at communion) the slip

of the richest parishioner nine percent less

than his tithe, the leaded glint in that particular pane

of stained glass in the sacred heart window as penance

before mass dwindles it to smoke and the boy comes

to dress him in the vestments of Christmas--purple

is it? No, that’s lent.  White, right, and a swatch

of green. St. Patrick’s seen it and all and can’t

blink or feel sorry choked as he is with all those sins

and snakes.  Yes, I’m telling you it takes me back.

But especially it was the coming up on, just the other day,

the Native American rising up out of the Rosa Rugosa

the carved face I set my own hand against, warm on warm

cooling while the sun was going down.  I loved how

the artist had seen it all in the long log it was, maybe pulled

it out of some winter’s pile meant to be split and pined,

burned in the little kitchen stove he made his tea

on, gloves and all.  He saw this chief and day

after day chiseled away to make him what he is, at least

to me, right, as he looks out to sea at the saltiest confessional

of all, a broader coming and going of tide and life washed up

and washed in.  It’s his lips and wide nose I admire, his

unapologetic (not like the saints at mass) glance.  Mostly

though it’s the split in the wood straight down

the edge of his left eye, from headdress feathers

to chin, dignity and silence, still in some way

alive, more alive at being given to the weather,

not held under solid dust and chipping paint and plaster,

what flakes now and falls all week long

and is vacuumed before the new priest comes,

the new one on retreat, the manic depressive,

who’ll take long walks in the night out at low tide,

throwing all his faith to the creak of the old crumbling

factories, their scattering bricks, the gulls that squawk

at him and shit as they fly by, bullies all, sometimes facing

sometimes not, the mute coolness of the Indian

the priest has yet to find.