Visitations
It’s not that it’s unusual
for the saints to visit my dreams.
Francis once shuffled up to the screen door
caked in red clay dust,
trailed by a dozen woodland creatures
who raided my cupboards
for bread and nuts
while he wearily brushed himself off
on the shag rug.
Teresa came from Avila
to overhaul the order of my bookshelves,
and express her serious concern
over the weariness she'd heard in my writing.
During vigils, she hovered.
During dinner, she paced.
I was relieved when she left,
even as the warm aura of mothering
left with her.
Yesterday, I read that when she was nine,
the one they called "Little Flower"
shook the room at night
with her body's tremors,
and that she was subsequently diagnosed
with an excess of emotional frustration.
I could relate.
So I read on to her death of tuberculosis
too few years later,
her lungs breaking down to liquid in her chest,
rising up like magma through her throat.
In those feverish days of dying,
she made a promise:
"I will use my time in heaven
to love the earth.
I will send rainstorms of roses."
And I begin to understand why we pray
to the minor saints.
When she entered the convent,
the nuns appraised her with amusement.
She was precocious and wildly sensitive.
She devoured the attention of her superiors.
She was, they said,
"a soul that wanted everything."
I know for what approximates fact
that she wanted to feel the lightning strike
of transubstantiation in her hands
this side of death,
if she had not already.
So in my dream last night,
she flopped down moodily beside me
on the cement curb
in the blazing August sun
and handed me a grape popsicle
dripping down her arm, then mine.
She stretched out her pale, round legs
and set to sullen study
of the sparkling mica flecks in the pavement,
her shoulder leaning into me
like my daughter in a church pew,
less than half-earnestly trying
to contain her fiery impatience.
Until, of course, she can't.
"I'm still practicing, you know.
They have to let me do it someday."
She reaches into her backpack
for a ragged crust of bread,
raises it to heave raining crumbs
on her shirt,
and turns to place a piece
on my lips.
The burning world around us,
writ small,
quivers in her eyes.
