Les Très Riches Heures de Florida

NONES At three p.m. under sky coming to harm something too red flashes from a limb, so red it hurts: against sky coming apart, against a left-out, twice-soaked shirt, a cardinal inflames the profane cathedral of suburban yard its owner let fall into disgrace. How rain embarrasses the half-pruned hedge. The half-mown grass that sports a tonsure in reverse shines under the torture. Rain slicks with praise red shed, red feather. Crested seedeater out of character where you’re neither the strictly monkish brown thrasher nor the odd hermit thrush, you scratch in the underbrush of faith to see what you can flush: a grub. A seed. Eminence not grise but rouge, from your lipsticked beak you pass a sowbug to your mate. You peck at a slug sliming your path, seeming to beg your forgiveness. To what would you confess beyond season-to-season unfaithfulness? VESPERS There are more divine hours: a gold-leafed page a mower rows with a scythe as tall as the tower that tents aloft a tiny sky bereft of cloud, a chapel ceiling left unstarred, heaven a lake turned upside down, filled with an emptiness that’s clean because it’s cold, glacial enough to scald the skin it bathed, the lungs it filled. On devotion’s last page, deep in the golden age of illumination, the hunt’s cortège has halted at the edge of the known world, a clearing wedged in a forest of spears. Red bird the badge on the huntsman’s tunic, you’re the splash of crimson lake, the distant lordship’s flag, the cleric dog’s bright collar, its heretic tongue. It slavers on the bleeding stag. Snarling at prayer that chases belief, it licks the offal of grief, the heart cast aside reward enough.