Читать книгу Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones - Lucia Perillo - Страница 16

At St. Placid’s

She wears a habit the unlikely blue color

of a swimming pool, the skin of her face

smooth where it shows beneath a wimple

from which one blond strand escapes.

While she squints at the sun, her hands

knit themselves in the folds of her skirts.

The man she’s speaking to, the monk,

is also young, his shoulders broad

from shooting baskets in the gym.

I have seen him running across the fields

in his nylon shorts, big muscles like roasts

sheathing the bones in his thighs.

They are standing on the monastery’s walkway

and I am at the window watching

this moment when their voices fall away,

nothing left but the sound of water dripping

off the trees, a fuchsia brooding in a basket

over her left shoulder. Silent now,

they are thinking. But not

about that. The fine weather, yes,

the church bells, the cross, an old woman

who used to come to Mass who’s dying.

All this they think of. But surely

not about that, no. Not that other thing.