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II

The second consideration of the holy stigmata

(Preparation)

Orlando heaped up food to crowd

the hermit’s appetite, wine to wet the failing eye.

Having been fathered himself, Francis opened

under that canopy: the singing of rain on leaves,

like his old happiness, back when stars and clouds

were his great company. Among towering beeches,

God’s green hands, only death now between them,

the garden stretching skyward: there before the moon

was moon, cooled as it was, in an egress of geese,

he knew what his brothers needed from him:

that he see who he was. So he walked mountain fissures,

for the congealed, us, who for want of praise

find ourselves split, other. Brothers watched him rise,

bring back their sins, chose, not surprisingly,

wider orbits, around him, themselves.

An angel consoled: “The order stays—the order stays;

even the foulest, if he love the brothers,

mercy,” a laundry list for the pure of heart.

“Many will be perfect.”

So encouraging his want, he fasted on her life—

where the only voice Mary probably heard

was her own, hanging laundry.

Little tramps: the saint running a Chaplinesque Leo

back and forth to mountain shouting,

finally finding a place where no one

could hear him, inspect.

In silence, Francis would be elsewhere:

a healthy fool made to lie down

and lose what he had grown to love: his ridiculous life,

spooned out of his mouth for his kin, lifted up

like the joyful paralytic, through the roof of heaven.

And because Francis was so small, a devil came:

leaved, licking the hunch on its back—

finally humped, hunkering away

like a sputtering machine clamped to its nut,

without savor, sinking deeper into that desperate glee,

where the only thing to enjoy is self

humoring self, audience of one, returns

diminishing. (And decades later, that same limp

shook a friar between his teeth, spat him down,

the brother crying out as he fell, log bridge on his head.

In an instant, Francis placed him—completed

at the bottom. Meanwhile, his brothers, who had heard the voice

and come for the body, were amazed, found it,

singing, a small log still on his head. What could they do?

They sang as well: the chasm, some with clumps of dirt

on their heads, some arm in arm,

each looking foolish enough to stick out.)

Because Francis was no leader they came,

because he never knew what to say. This time

it would be a bird who would remind him

just how much he needed. It would wake him

for matins, singing or beating its wings.

He’d rise, crack his knuckles, or not when his bones

refused the call, the cold giving-way in them,

when he could feel each move toward parchment:

hollow and gaunt, hungry as his feasting self.

It would sit with him, push pebbles,

his fingers around in the dirt.