Thursday (no. 2)

"Change your way of looking.”

—Plotinus

“Vivifying contact with that which is absolutely alive."

—Novalis

I

It was a snowy day outside, and cold;

I wore my woven scarf while walking down

to mass, unwrapping only when the word

was over, and the liturgy was changed

to of-the-Eucharist. 

                              It was early yet,

and so I knelt and said my rosary

with tight-closed eyes, reigning my senses in.

Someone walked by—I couldn’t help but hear—

and in my weakness, I looked up—but tried

to look up piously towards the glass

way up above the altarpiece; so, as

the man in my periphery threw off

his jacket, I re-focused to the front,

and saw how light was streaming down from the glass

despite the thin gray sky behind it; and

I noticed how the light fell on the stalls

in one still wave that softly washed through me,

suffusing all these pews where a young girl,

and back one row, a young man sat; and how

the deep wood of the benches filled with light

as if their grains were generating it

from in now gravid darknesses—

II

                                                   Later, then,

when the priest raised that bread-no-longer-bread,

my heart leapt in my stomach to my mouth—

as, just for one quick second, from where I knelt

far at the back of church, I thought the priest’s

hands had been empty, and two heavy fists

harpagmon-clutched at nothing—but it was

just that the host had blended with the stones

behind the altar.

III

                         Finally, when I

received our JESUS in the veil of bread,

when, usually, I’d fold my fragment up

into one part from four, along the lines

of the embedded cross in it—this time,

it had no seams, and was unfoldable,

and so I let it melt slow through my mouth.

But even when I made my exit, warmed,

I felt that HE still lodged there in my throat