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.
