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Never let my hands be to any one an occasion to temptation. — ISABEL DE FLORES She was the joke of the angels—a girl crazy enough for God that she despised her own beauty; who grew bitter herbs to mix with her food, who pinned a garland of roses to her forehead; and who, in a fury of desire concocted a potion of Indian pepper and bark and rubbed it on her face, neck, and breasts, disfiguring herself. Then, locked away in a dark cell, where no reflection was possible, she begged for death to join her with her Master whom she called Divine Bridegroom, Thorn in My Heart, Eternal Spouse.

When no one else would listen, Saint Anthony preached seaward, his words fishnet for the lost souls of the heretics. Caught up in despair, we plea to the one who will listen: Saint Anthony, please return Tía’s teeth or the misplaced key to our bolted hopes. Patron retriever of all we’ve tossed when no one else would. Listen, Saint Anthony, teach us to steward this world, all our netted loss.

You’re flush with hearts and I’m forced to fold this hand and swear off another luckless match. How we’ve found ways to love each other, cajoled our cindered hearts, flushed and forced to fold upon themselves like Saint Valentine ensouled with seizure, skin a whirring bee swarm, a hatched flush of doves. My heart, how I’m forced to fold my hands in prayer for another struck match.

for Janet and Christopher Half-eagle, half-lion, the fabulous animal struts, saber-clawed but saintly, a candlewicked ornament dangling from our rickety sugar pine. Butternut pudding in our bellies. His reindeer and sleigh hurried here and gone—thank God for us childless folks. Almost:   the lovelocked Griffins on the sofa, sockfooted, hearing gas and a kiddy heart in her tummy— a life more imaginary than real, though one is dazzled by gold that fills the egg unbroken. We feed her crumpets and listen again: The lamb’s a hungry bugger, even snug from earth’s imponderable fury. Tomorrow, in a spurt by jet I’m home. Clumsy as a puppy I’ll scale the flightstairs into the nosecone, luggage banging at my sides, enter the egg- shaped cabin and await the infrared climb toward space. Tell me one thing true? If I could count the way things slip from us: Mother’s fur gloves, Sunday’s benediction, the dead gone before us, love’s rambler on the prairie—all displaced as we buckle in our shuttle, jetbound on a screaming runway, gravity pulling at us castaways, more mammal than bird, subtle leg-weary griffins made manifest, arrowing towards home. How do we ignore it: the attenuated being of our age, the bittersweet collapse of dominoes mooned around our pine? Withered with hatred from his quarter, Saint Stephen even at death rolled mercifully over in high holiness. Sonless, wifeless, nine thousand feet from land, I roll the lozenge on my tongue, youthful habit for ache of any kind, parting a survivor (Wait!), love rescuing me from the fringe.

Love the drill, confound the dentist. Love the fever that carries me home. Meat of exile. Salt of grief. This much, indifferent affliction might yield. But how when the table is God’s own board and grace must be said in company? If hatred were honey, as even the psalmist persuaded himself, then Agatha might be holding her breasts on the plate for reproach. The plate is decidedly ornamental, and who shall say that pity’s not, at this remove? Her gown would be stiff with embroidery whatever the shape of the body beneath. Perhaps in heaven God can’t hide his face. So the wounded are given these gowns to wear and duties that teach them the leverage of pain. Agatha listens with special regard to the barren, the dry, to those with tumors where milk should be, to those who nurse for hire. Let me swell, let me not swell. Remember the child, how its fingers go blind as it sucks. Bartholomew, flayed, intervenes for the tanners. Catherine for millers, whose wheels are of stone. Sebastian protects the arrowsmiths, and John the chandlers, because he was boiled in oil. We borrow our light where we can, here’s begging the pardon of tallow and wick. And if, as we’ve tried to extract from the prospect, we’ll each have a sign to be known by at last— a knife, a floursack, a hammer, a pot— the saints can stay, the earth won’t entirely have given us up.

The park admits the wind, the petals lift and scatter like versions of myself I was on the verge of becoming; and ten years on and ten blocks down I still can’t tell whether this dispersal resembles a fist unclenching or waving goodbye. But the petals scatter faster, seeking the rose, the cigarette vendor, and at least I’ve got by pumping heart some rules of conduct: refuse to choose between turning pages and turning heads though the stubborn dine alone. Get over “getting over”: darks clouds don’t fade but drift with ever deeper colors. Give up on rooted happiness (the stolid trees on fire!) and sweet reprieve (a poor park but my own) will follow. There is still a chance the empty gazebo will draw crowds from the greater world. And meanwhile, meanwhile’s far from nothing: the humming moment, the rustle of cherry trees.

For Micah Ruelle We were not green in judgment or cold in blood like Cleopatra in her youth who still was ordering chopped radish in her bowls back then, the hearts all gone to pieces next to the winter greens that in our days we never had use for so smitten were we with fire and ovens that I was gravy in judgment, which might not mean much unless you’ve taken a spoon of it and poured it back over a dumpling shaped like your heart so that it became even softer, something you could not have thought possible. It’s all happening now, you liked to say, and I agreed, though it was not the news from the outside I relished, but the daily Extra! Extra! the light of the morning brought to my attention every time we woke in your house or my house and my heart — salty, risen — was warm again in a way it hadn’t been for years. Organ of passion, organ of righteousness that has never had a single flavor cross its lips, how could you know how much I would miss the honey of those days, her drizzle of it on the turkey bacon, my cracking pepper up and down the pan, the sweet meat of happiness I would no longer let pass between our teeth.

Older now, he is among us in diminished form, clothes sagging, hat large on the fine head He likes the largest stores             acres of socks and tuna             where high girders look down on him also                        who pushes his cart and leans on it a little . . . something sacramental about the belittling perspective          something heroic about the high shadows in the niches of the corrugated roof beneath which under spotlights that don't spread far he moves with the people who comb through the aisles               pulling down unwieldy batches of single things                   to last them through cold time that can't be trusted There he is at the far end of an avenue of obelisks of paper head cunningly mobile like a bird's                         eyes quick like one beading on flecks that might be the morsels that it needs or on grains                           or seeds At this its faltering morse of chirrups                     but no long address only the same few wordchains at my feet water water water millet beak millet crack millet air down danger aieeeeeeee

Miguel might, if he speaks English, call the colors of ukuleles stretching their necks from yards of canvas duffel yoked across his shoulders, auroral azul, cherry pop, or mojito green, under this Pac Heights sky where the awful rich snap their heels past shop windows, past goatskin bags and spiked heels that bring them closer to heaven, fibristic sheets of celadon paper from Zhejiang,

I scissor the stem of the red carnation and set it in a bowl of water. It floats the way your head would, if I cut it off. But what if I tore you apart for those afternoons when I was fifteen and so like a bird of paradise slaughtered for its feathers. Even my name suggested wings, wicker cages, flight. Come, sit on my lap, you said. I felt as if I had flown there; I was weightless. You were forty and married. That she was my mother never mattered. She was a door that opened onto me. The three of us blended into a kind of somnolence and musk, the musk of Sundays. Sweat and sweetness. That dried plum and licorice taste always back of my tongue and your tongue against my teeth, then touching mine. How many times?— I counted, but could never remember. And when I thought we’d go on forever, that nothing could stop us as we fell endlessly from consciousness, orders came: War in the north. Your sword, the gold epaulets, the uniform so brightly colored, so unlike war, I thought. And your horse; how you rode out the gate. No, how that horse danced beneath you toward the sound of cannon fire. I could hear it, so many leagues away. I could see you fall, your face scarlet, the horse dancing on without you. And at the same moment, Mother sighed and turned clumsily in the hammock, the Madeira in the thin-stemmed glass spilled into the grass, and I felt myself hardening to a brandy-colored wood, my skin, a thousand strings drawn so taut that when I walked to the house I could hear music tumbling like a waterfall of China silk behind me. I took your letter from my bodice. Salome, I heard your voice, little bird, fly. But I did not. I untied the lilac ribbon at my breasts and lay down on your bed. After a while, I heard Mother's footsteps, watched her walk to the window. I closed my eyes and when I opened them the shadow of a sword passed through my throat and Mother, dressed like a grenadier, bent and kissed me on the lips.