Women's Day, March 8

Judith and Holofernes. Jael and Sisera.

And me, plucking up orange petals from the cobblestone street, beneath the apartment window.

Blown a kiss in passing. Whistled at the evening before by two smoking men in a glowing doorway. “Tutta bella,” our landlord grinned as he handed us the key.

Is this honor or dishonor? Why am I ashamed?

It cuts me quickly to be perceived as available because American, judged by the immediacy of beauty.

What do I want, really?

“Nothing I know of yet.”

Rarely have I wanted so concretely as I have here, to be held. To be desired as wife, companion, friend. I cannot be your mother.

How great the girl that carried Your small body in her womb, her arms, and limply on her lap at last. How great is gentleness?

Mother of God. Lilies, mimosa.

There is fierce hope in the feminine heart. Forgiveness. The more we give, the more we love, they’ve said.

Though we deserve every jab and label (paint thorns and needles - bark sharp orders - spiral into preening, posing, gleaming florid faces and bared flesh for “we are more like Eve than the animals”) –

This is, at last, a story of mercy.

A woman is not laughter, perfume, or lively conversation. She, must be holy.

And so hold pain, bear loss, and hope in the impossible.

I am deeply a woman here.

Orvieto 3: Koyaanisqatsi

When the world is too large for us, where can we turn?

How can I make myself large enough to hold this? Where can I hide?

How can I know the needs of the my own humanity in the context of a crowd?

A sea of scrub brush, a sea of garish painted faces, plastic hair.

I only want one face of hope to fix on, two eyes of compassion. A well of clear water in a fizzling ocean.

We are in love with our own helplessness. We will cut off our anchors ourselves.

The original sin. We will live unhinged.

Be true to treachery until its walls cave in.

Be true to truth, and inscribe its emblems on your skin.

Orvieto II: Living Earth

“Is he not the earthliest of all?”

If this city is true, it is a truth below the surface of stone and the measure of bleating bell. It is a true deeper than its own façade, its own sincerity. This means more, so look at me. Give me time. See a small thread winding through my side, and there in contemplation find a silent iridescent solace.

Celestial in the melancholy sunlight. Smoke-stained joy. A rumbling, a shudder, pressure on the wide paned glass with each car’s passing.

We are delighted in the commonest novelties. Sugar, cream, caffeine. And then a rending, tearing at the lungs when the rarest familiar appears in the space between two walls.

Hollow out a place for me.

Rinse my eyes from a flash-enamored glaze. Subdue my gaze to that of a mother bearing the weight of humanity’s wings: I here bring a life to the world: earth’s richest soil will feed him, and he will know pain.

Teach these stones to speak. They have spoken. They are speaking.

And we are shot with realization. Here is a need that can only be met by

Incarnation.

Italics: Flight After Death by Carl Nellis

Orvieto I

In Your Passion You embraced us:

What pain to know

That I cannot be crucified

With arms folded.

I.

We do not exist until we give. And so,

I knew I

was

when

I played the old tunes

of my bedroom and the woods,

in the stirring air of the

Terrazza.

Your love blew me into corners, billowing my clothes and making a

fantastic fool of me.

Still too stunned for weeping, a single drop chilled on

my cheek.

Trembling at the knees. Hardly knowing the blaze of my own smile.

Am I like this?

Can the world be really so

beautiful…

Can I know what I do not own?

Only when,

Then.

II.

If I could only wind myself around one spiral of Your house, fold myself in one cleft of Your walls. I would stay there content for the rest of my life. To trust Your love is gentle as the February sun, no less true because unusually kind. God does no thing in halves. And I must choose. And I will choose – to let You in, with dripping hands, a wildly beating heart, an urge to dance.

And I said, undivided love is true romance.

III.

Know only “grazie” and say it a thousand times. If I could know but one word,

let me know Your Name. So strange

to find the word that sustains the weary in a different same: Gesu.

Gesu, mio amore e speranza.

Wings

I heard the swift call as I watched
The ease with which it flew:
You dream of wings, while I would wish
To be a maiden true.

I Am Here

I am nestled in my blankets with the fresh and heavy dampness of my hair
around me,
Hearing the refrigerator hum, and the ticking of the pink-rimmed clock that I've had almost for as long as I can remember.
So those old memories pulse like the colors in my closed eyes,
And tingle faintly, like the numbing roughness of my singed tongue --
How I used to scribble in my notebooks,
                                                  I am here
And longed to be remembered for each moment as I lived it. God, put this in Your photo album, tuck it in Your pocket. Let me just say I recognize I am. Right now.
And tell me how You savor days like candy in the corner of Your mouth, for the long ride home.

Maybe I desire because I can't understand, or maybe very transience is beauty.
Maybe I just want to know that I can be delighted in, as I delight in You, this wonder.
One thing is clear: time is only lengthened by points of meaning.

Even in Laughter...

Where Jupiter and Janus embrace: in a two-faced jollity.