Four Poems

Marianne Peel

Follow the gravel road

to the left, circle past the barn,

corkscrew past the bundles of hay. 

Listen for the morning dove’s call.

She will guide you

to the labyrinth. 

Stone next to stone,

spiraling in the clearing.

Nuns in habits, thick as burquas,

carried rocks in aprons,

in wheelbarrows,

in wagons. The Sisters fingered rosaries

and sang Gregorian Chant

as they placed stone snug to stone.                               

They chanted praise songs

to the cedars in these woods.

These nuns prayed for discernment:

which stones belonged together,

which sought the other out for companion,

married in this hard-scrabble ground?

A pair becomes a quartet becomes

Listen to this forest symphony

of communion. Slow walk,

feeding your bare feet

on this coiling.  Find your way

to center. And there

you will find

treasures left just for you

from other travelers. 

A beer bottle cap.

A stub of a candle.

A rusted horseshoe.

An empty locket.

A string of broken

worry beads. 

I have been to the pond, sitting on the bench

near Mary, who is bolted to the edge of the water.

I wonder if she unhinges herself at night

  long after the bull frogs have gone to silence,

  long after the stars have illuminated the forest burial ground.

And I wonder

if Mary disrobes,

unravels herself from the cloth

ribboning her body

If she skinny-dips her round-bellied

mother-self into the tufts of algae

If she conjures the paddling turtles

into a symphony of ancient shells.

She who says yes and yes and yes

  with a quivering in her knees

  with a willingness to heave her vulnerable body           

        into a bottomless space,

  this water now painting her limbs

       with the etude of the red-winged blackbird.

This morning, I miss your old buttery fingers.

We are ancient hands plaited together.

No longer soft pools of lace,

we carry more of the honeyed heaviness,

knowing the art of how to twine our bodies.

For seventeen years, I asked you

to write a love letter to me.

Your academic-ness, your professorish-ness

coiled tightly, like a peony bud, wrapped

in literary analysis, in thesis and evidence.

You don’t know what to make

of my poet-self. And I have just begun

to claim poet when strangers ask what I do. 

I no longer whisper my occupation.

But what we do, together, vibrates

in an underground city, illuminated

only by the light slanting through

the venetian blinds, the revolving doors.                                     

You wrote me a love letter in December.

I re-read that letter this morning.

Sat in a plaid upholstered rocker,

next to the window bordered by eyelet curtains. 

A spring bee propelled her body against the screen,

a red-winged black bird swooped to protect her nest.

I wove your words between my hands.

Filled my arms with lush trembling, your desire

to tell me words you’ve never

allowed yourself to say. 

I sit among the dead nuns

under a thunder sky.

Their grave markers flat stones

blurring with the weighted metal sky.

Some say they are bourbon nuns

but the only substance these Sisters brew

and bottle is a fervent potion

of stewardship of the land.

I want to toast these nuns

with a bottle of Four Roses.

Crack the neck open on the corner’s edge

of Philomene’s, Mistress of Novices, stone.

I sing their names. Abide their syllables

to the sweetgrass and then set them to flight.

Their names vibrate between birdsong,

become one

with the orchard oriole,                                                         

the Carolina wren,

the yellow-rumped warbler.

I listen between the notes,

a cloistered silence. Their names

like rosary beads in my mouth:

Clotilde, Symphrose, Isidore,

Coronita, Mauritia, Ceceliana.

Bind me to the birds

and the butterflies of Loretto.

Make of my life

a soaring song.