St. Francis Poems. David Craig

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СКАЧАТЬ watch him ascend, arms outstretched,

      prayers lost in the murmuring leaves.

      This was just one more place they could not go:

      the slow patrol, the troop with too many voices.

      Like us, they knew half the way there: the hand

      half-outstretched, the smile plainly given.

      When he came down, in strength not his own,

      the brothers got him an ass: a different one—

      an owner with something to say. “Be nothing

      less than people—hope of thee.”

      Sitting at the foot of the mountain,

      ridiculous as the pigeons on his head, his legs,

      a bird dropping on his robe, Francis smiled,

      his back against a tree. “God is pleased,” he said,

      “because so much joy is shown by our sisters, the birds.”

      Men rolled to their feet, followed in the morning mist,

      quiet as a suburban lawn, all the mowers asleep.

      II

      The second consideration of the holy stigmata

      (Preparation)

      Orlando heaped up food to crowd

      the hermit’s appetite, wine to wet the failing eye.

      Having been fathered himself, Francis opened

      under that canopy: the singing of rain on leaves,

      like his old happiness, back when stars and clouds

      were his great company. Among towering beeches,

      God’s green hands, only death now between them,

      the garden stretching skyward: there before the moon

      was moon, cooled as it was, in an egress of geese,

      he knew what his brothers needed from him:

      that he see who he was. So he walked mountain fissures,

      for the congealed, us, who for want of praise

      find ourselves split, other. Brothers watched him rise,

      bring back their sins, chose, not surprisingly,

      wider orbits, around him, themselves.

      An angel consoled: “The order stays—the order stays;

      even the foulest, if he love the brothers,

      mercy,” a laundry list for the pure of heart.

      “Many will be perfect.”

      So encouraging his want, he fasted on her life—

      where the only voice Mary probably heard

      was her own, hanging laundry.

      Little tramps: the saint running a Chaplinesque Leo

      back and forth to mountain shouting,

      finally finding a place where no one

      could hear him, inspect.

      In silence, Francis would be elsewhere:

      a healthy fool made to lie down

      and lose what he had grown to love: his ridiculous life,

      spooned out of his mouth for his kin, lifted up

      like the joyful paralytic, through the roof of heaven.

      And because Francis was so small, a devil came:

      leaved, licking the hunch on its back—

      finally humped, hunkering away

      like a sputtering machine clamped to its nut,

      without savor, sinking deeper into that desperate glee,

      where the only thing to enjoy is self

      humoring self, audience of one, returns

      diminishing. (And decades later, that same limp

      shook a friar between his teeth, spat him down,

      the brother crying out as he fell, log bridge on his head.

      In an instant, Francis placed him—completed

      at the bottom. Meanwhile, his brothers, who had heard the voice

      and come for the body, were amazed, found it,

      singing, a small log still on his head. What could they do?

      They sang as well: the chasm, some with clumps of dirt

      on their heads, some arm in arm,

      each looking foolish enough to stick out.)

      Because Francis was no leader they came,

      because he never knew what to say. This time

      it would be a bird who would remind him

      just how much he needed. It would wake him

      for matins, singing or beating its wings.

      He’d rise, crack his knuckles, or not when his bones

      refused the call, the cold giving-way in them,

      when he could feel each move toward parchment:

      hollow and gaunt, hungry as his feasting self.

      It would sit with him, push pebbles,

      his fingers around in the dirt.

      III

      The third consideration of the holy stigmata

      (Gifts)

      Yellow-faced, sweaty, in the torch descending,

      Leo saw it rest on Francis’ head, an absent voice

      murmuring СКАЧАТЬ