Saints’ Logic

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.