After The Seven Acts of Mercy
This This, we want, she thinks,
desperate, ignorant, thinking
the beating heart will break, believing
it will break us, believing
it is it, not that we are still
to be found under the breastbone of the beloved.
Arriving in our darkness,
salve syllables over the winding sheet,
behind the eyes,
a dream of angels walking the stair,
or tumbling through cloud,
carries us with them,
past commiseration,
and the heart beats mightily
in the crickets’ summons,
after the imperious sun,
when the slide of light breaks open the attention
and we are taken out of ourselves,
past the careful stigmata,
to a lake where a red girl in a hammock
stitches words from wreckage
under two maples, unmerited, under the hold of heaven
and she stops, quickened by an absence
of language: buttercups in the warm grass,
the twick twick twick of a goldfinch,
a crow’s blue black, a timbre of leaves,
even the peopled street she remembers,
its chiaroscuro of beggars and rich men’s sleeves
in the stunned eyes of a young woman
giving her breast to her jailed father
under the smile of Caravaggio’s Christ.
Light of night, light that folds out
from her, and on her, falling
from the smiling calm, mother and child
above, and torch light thrown in flame-shape
down her face, throat, breast
where the green dress is parted – the center,
deep heart
caught by the painter in all time
where we walk here every day and do not notice
the rich the poor the quiet lake
the goldfinch the grass, afraid to walk in splendor
unless turning from time to time
to each other in acts of love
almost unendurable,
for we are not done, we darkly, hardly
able to come where no love is
and love’s force insistent – soft here now –
while all around us furious joy is gathering the kingdoms.
– rosemary winslow