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[silverflurry.livejournal.com]

Immolations


What looks like a woman
walking away from her candles
is a woman encouraged

to set fire to her prayers,
leave them
abandoned and burning
beyond recognition. In that heat,

God's intermediaries
strip down to their souls
while I press my forehead

against the cool tombs of saints
and murmur my endless requests.
Among candles, incense,

how many souls
show up in heaven
smelling of smoke?

How many show up
smelling like a house on fire,
like a pile of burning books,

like the torching of Dresden,
like a necklace in flames?

Somewhere, somebody's
pulling a plague house
down over its owner,
while my loved ones rise

from their own private ovens:
ashes boxed
and brought back to me cold.
At the end of the day,

stand quiet in the darkest
corner of a chapel
and you won't spook God

while He feeds on each prayer's
discrete, smoldering
carcass;

He feeds surrounded
by what God leaves behind them:
hair strands, blood spatters, bone.

Catherine Sasanov
All the Blood Tethers
2002 Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize
Selected by Rosanna Warren
Northeastern University Press