Mortify my passions that I may be ever more pleasing and acceptable in the sight of my dear Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, Who lives and reigns world without end. Amen.
—Novena for Saint Rose of Lima
My neighbor is harvesting figs from the tree
beside her coral pink house. She’ll probably take
them in to her husband, press them apart
with her thumbs, tongue the flesh. All around us
the neighborhood is fecund heat, cicadas calling
mates so they can hurry up and die, pears
and apples swelling, softening, falling
in the gutters along the street to feed the wasps
whose miasmic horde seems to double
each humid hour. The couple walks barefoot,
hand in hand after the sordid summer rains,
like their soles are savoring it, like all thunder
is just accompaniment to their own
absorbing fervor, like when they bloat
into the afterlife it will be an endless warmth
of each other’s flesh. I watch. From my second story
window, from the porch, behind a screen. Finger
the rosary hanging from my headboard,
dangle my head off the side of my mattress
to see the couple hanging from the earth
before retreating into the mess of green life.
Is there any heavenly reward worth this stillness?
Mosquitoes fill even stagnant flower pots
with breeding. In the midst of her nightly vigils
Saint Rose—patron of gardeners, of details,
of blooming; from blood, blisters, silver;
blessed lace-guised starvation—must have spied
the candle in her parents’ window guttering
with an unseen, easy breath, and known that nothing
could make her a stranger to her body
or the wants bodies share, to navels rising
and falling like hesitant flowers on the verge
of opening. All my attempted solitude
fills with donning secondhand tulle and practicing
poses, but even the fogged windows can’t obscure
the light that settles into the trees’ cradle
of branches. I can take all of it: The room;
the temple’s sweat; the glint in the priest’s eye
before he forgives us passionates each Wednesday;
the devotional flames, grinning their yellowed smile
in the back of the sanctuary; fruit
in cardboard boxes begging Take us, free!
Even the single rose hiding in the neighbor’s bush,
praying to be chosen, I’ll take her, too,
to be preserved like the stained glass morning glory
that threatens to shine from its coral pink wall forever.
