Читать книгу St. Francis Poems - David Craig - Страница 13

I

The first consideration of the holy stigmata

(The mountain is offered)

In the forty-third year of his Lord, this little man,

bread for the birds, set off,

(like us, but without our sense of direction).

Oblivious, he joined the green-throated chorus,

petal and pistil, him so sunk in his robe

that you had to go through the smiles to find him.

Earth was a place to be swept, cleaned: broom of dirt

on a sea of dirt, dirt on dirt dancing.

He wanted to be a dandelion spore, tiny

piked pinwheel, silk with a snag, under the great wooden

cart-like wheel of the stars.

Orlando de Chiuse, though, needed his heart-rings numbered,

the years having pushed his best years away.

He saw and detested it, this told joke,

this self, house of cards, shill under money’s glass.

He knew his road too well:

a topography of Lent, the burden of the strong—

a collection plate feeding too many hands.

“So great is the good I hope for, all pain delights me . . .”

(This was a different time I should tell you.

People listened. And each, in his own hearing,

received the measure of his pain: small, like the wound

at Jesus’ side, stretch and serous fluid,

His labored breathing: the catch there in his ribs—steps,

like an uneven playing field, each of your friends,

one by one, leaving; just you in snake-skin boots,

off the Trailways at the edge of this no-town—

the abandoned gas station, ancient, rusty, shell-white pumps,

the hot crackle of tall, dry grass, sting of grasshoppers

as you walk through a field, duffle bag in hand.

And finally, as you expected, the distant

gathering of skyline, dark, across the southern

Colorado plain: the throat of God.)

Orlando wanted out of himself, whatever that was,

away from the easy laughter of friends.

Yes, “most willingly,” Francis would speak to him.

“But first honor thy friends who have invited thee to feast.”

(All things in time, at time’s pace,

so that time and earth might be valued.)

And then the gift—a mountain: shaven heads,

measuring prayer, two of the wiser friars

on the periphery, where the only voice they heard

was God’s: in green leaf, the drinking of water

against sunny banks, refracted feet—how it thirsted one,

for the Spirit and for how he meant things;

while the soldiers: in issued boots, the company swill

that grumbled long before rations.

Everyone there beginning in that place everyone does,

out of the place he had settled on: the glamourless gospel,

accomplished through repetition, the showing up:

the time beneath time were time noun enough—

grace and movement, and it’s the effort that stays,

the long and quiet patience of God.

Eventually, Masseo de Marignano, Angelo Tancredi,

and Leo, the slow, go with him: James, Peter, John;

they watch him ascend, arms outstretched,

prayers lost in the murmuring leaves.

This was just one more place they could not go:

the slow patrol, the troop with too many voices.

Like us, they knew half the way there: the hand

half-outstretched, the smile plainly given.

When he came down, in strength not his own,

the brothers got him an ass: a different one—

an owner with something to say. “Be nothing

less than people—hope of thee.”

Sitting at the foot of the mountain,

ridiculous as the pigeons on his head, his legs,

a bird dropping on his robe, Francis smiled,

his back against a tree. “God is pleased,” he said,

“because so much joy is shown by our sisters, the birds.”

Men rolled to their feet, followed in the morning mist,

quiet as a suburban lawn, all the mowers asleep.