Читать книгу St. Francis Poems - David Craig - Страница 5

His birth, vanity, frivolity and prodigality, how he became generous and charitable to the poor.

Dignity underfoot, he sang so loudly from stumps,

imaginary instruments, that anyone who passed

just had to watch him dare himself, paint his way

into one spiritual corner after another,

until he had no options but severest truth,

in the boisterous rhymes of the troubadours—

set right, by a grin so local it owns the world.

His father had named him after a country

where they knew their fabric, where they valued

life’s buckled and measured step

as well as its print, had insisted on a carafe of friends,

ridiculous neighbors—though Pica

wanted the breath of God: Giovanni!

So Francis learned to trade the prayer

the best cloth was for the smiles of new friends.

After work, his mates rang in the chorus

his money made: a cascade of mirth, grace,

surrounded as they all were,

by the cold stones of the only night.

It was all he could give them.

(Was he vain—or just so caught up in his enthusiasms

that they’d begun to make their own demands?)

He’d sew rags to more expensive stuffs,

embracing, again that widow want,

knowing he could not, needing to tell everyone

that as well. So he became a jongleur,

a determined clown, standing in the breech

between the sorrowful truth of this world

and the fleeting faces of his friends.

Courteous in manner, speech, even beyond

his exaggerated self-conscious parody;

everyone knew he could name his own future.

He loved to pose, but only because it promised

what was, in some real way, already here—

until a customer’s smirk razed him, brought him down

to squalor, to a world beyond his making,

to people who had nothing to give but their fleas.

It was that wound again,

what he and his friends felt: an abyss

that could not be filled.

Given this, he wondered, where could he live?