Sister Mary Agnes
Draft of a Long Poem, 1972
For more information on Sr. Mary Agnes see:
My lighting streaks the magnetic
furnace
seared white, fused, melted in its
source
seeming inseparable
the 2 units, confused so
intimately
as to be indistinguishable
veined and tissued, one…
Why this surmounting power of a
gull
beating the clouds’ crests,
breathless
(his shadow feather-soft below)
why the sudden simultaneous
collapse
the larval swirl, contrasted
I-negation
this cold knowledge;
my form lying in the dark,
unconscious earth
my bone of that same substance as
this crumbling stone
my thought-flashes like these
drying tongues
of leaves in late sun
I
who have shed acid tears
over my incompetence through
inauspicious years
have as well
hearing the first sun call
light from behind the hill
bidden a power arise through eyes
which had otherwise been bitter
seas
discovered I had mastered these
harvested abundant crops, then
scattered again
profusely, like sun-grain
to feed a barren land
or like a veil of soft rain…
they fell on rock, unresounding,
hit back
with a shock-donation of pain
Followed no hope, only the death
of hope
a long delay in trust
watching each letter torn from a
new day’s envelope
to discover
no word from the desired, the
lover:
numbed to stone by grey mid-day
dried to bone when a faint sun
closes one half-opened lid-
no hope this, nor
requiem for a departed hope
but a condemnation to perpetual
annihilation.
Who drew so suddenly juice from my
being
what mouth had sucked voraciously
left a discarded skin?
for all my glow was gone
that lit from within
who tore the leaves from their
rich crown-
reared but a twisted bone of thorn
desolate of song
Suspend no longer this
you-me-encounter
needing neither violence for affectation
of expression
You, before me, in perfection
I, an erratic spark, the flicker
of a star
fed from your combustion;
that occasional other
whom from time to time I recognize
(mar more frequently in my
imagination)
give me to see his reality
which shines before you, erect in
beauty
so that I may love him
when your sun sets over me, a
radiant dove
golden on her nest
and the time for words shall cease
timeless in rest
Draped in your folds
nights falling images
construct symbolic pyramids
death’s broken triangles, cold on
the face
held closer than close
your nearnesses encompass more
than space
fly into sunset distances the
bird-winged breaths
down silver slates, the falling
moon
the blood-faced moon, approaching
motionless
volcanic dragons smoulder in its
breath
So is this form, your formless
pace
unmeasured by the inches of my
grace
Sister
Mary Agnes
(Pamela
Chalkley)
copyright©Dick
Russell
2018
