More on: saint

It is said that a certain woman went to visit her sister. Before she knocked, she peeked through the curtain and witnessed something she had never seen.

At three, I saw the shade of living light. / At eight, I was enclosed as an oblate. / The universe is an egg, I said, / and the nuns promoted me.

A poem for Saint Wilgefortis, the bearded patron of women seeking liberation.

The first principle: Do no harm. The second: The air calls us home. Third, we must fill the bowls of others before we drain our own wells dry. The fourth is the dark night; the fifth a subtle scent of smoke and pine. The sixth is awareness of our duties, the burnt offering of our…

Imagine yourself an old wolf: lean and ragged, belly shrunken beneath a ribcage as bowed as a galleon’s undercarriage, shoulders broader than your painful hips, and paws the size of a lion’s. You terrify each living thing you encounter, voles and rats ducking into holes, rabbits humping their soft backs, propelled under bushes by back…

Someone always climbs a tree When a saint arrives—half- Way marker of earth and sky: You can’t get there from here. But this is how we represent Desire for liberation, human form As flag announcing spirit through Flesh. That boy reaches for a bird or palm, The top part of the tree where branches break…

1 The cloak of the saint was filled with roses The cloak of the saint rose above the city The cloak of the saint was thrown over the back of a chair it slowly filled with a human form it was filled with the sound of wind It floated down the mountainside sheep it passed…