Faithful See Virgin Mary in Office Window

In flowerbeds we crowd, some praying, some bowing as the world, minute as it is, stays in motion: box stores doing business, fast food joints, and above us a crow, secular bird, lighting on a lamppost while we take pictures or cry as if we could live forever in this gloried surround, gazing up at the window holding her bleared hair, her mouth that is a frenzy of trapped pollen or dust, eyes like smooth shells that make us forget what fertilized the flowers at our feet, bulbs fortified with potash or bone meal, dried blood, which reminds me of the Annunziata I saw in Italy, painted by those who thought color itself was divine: crushed shell, coral and ash, pigments mixed with egg in a man’s mouth, and I worry about standing too close to the believers, I who rubberneck and lie, do I stand too close to the woman at least six months along with her own child, waving a sonogram with a faint infant shape inside, an image scratched by waves: light squandered here, dilated there, compressed oil and dust as every body contains its atlas of salt, kiss-worn, and always some bud dreamed in springtime, and though I’m a yarner and one for whom doubt is a clutched root, I can’t yet walk to my car, standing here wondering if after His birth the virgin girl saw the rest of her life would be nothing but a way to talk about that morning: gold nearly blinding, herdsmen and kings, and with its broad warm tongue a cow licking the afterbirth from the hay.