Patchwork cloak

Patchwork cloak

I

The crypt of the Basilica in Assisi:
behind glass a rough, patched robe,
no, a robe of patches, “beast-colored,”
king-sized, labeled as
the ascetic’s—Saint Francis.

In the corner, filigreed reliquaries:
spidery bones and flaps of pemmican
pried from the corpses of clerics
and other saints centuries past.
Reliquary of the thorn
of the crown of thorns. Reliquary
of the hair of Saint Catherine.
Relic of the finger of Saint Andrew.

It is purport. It could be an ape
finger for all we know, displayed
by canny, enraptured, or even credulous
priests: for the flock’s tithes and offerings,
prayers, and pleas for dispensation.
For the continued fame of their parish
and of course the glory of the Faith....

Splinters of the True Cross cross
the empire, rusted nails and spots
of someone’s blood. There’s the slab
of marble in Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulcher,
submitting to the lips of prostrated millions,
although I learn “This is not
the stone on which Christ’s body was anointed.
This devotion is recorded only since
the 12th century. The present stone dates from 1810.”

The myth is believed, promulgated,
nurtured, notated, accepted. No one
knows whether Francis was thin or obese.
Paintings exist by the hundred of his imagined
gaunt frame, but the vast robe’s displayed
right there. Who is mistaken? Perhaps
no one is, and Francis was humbly
dwarfed by his tunic.
Another one in Florence has been proven
fake and one in Cortona is merely plausible.
The Assisi relic has not yet been tested.

At La Verna, monks pace the tiled loggia
in brown wool. Winter fog enrobes the cliffside
where Francis is said to have huddled in a niche
while Satan harangued and scarred him
through a storm. You can see the spot,
barely large enough to contain
my shivering ten-year-old daughter.

Far more believable are the humble ledgers
casually out of sight in an armoire
in the Volterra seminary-turned-hostel,
their frail pages inked with scrawled numbers,
400-year-old book-keeping, scrupulous,
humdrum and thoroughly ungilded.

II

In my town, an “Apothecary and Metaphysical Shop”
evokes the past, or its hypothesis. Kitty-
corner, a new steel dragon overlooks
the roof of an antiques shop with its horde of junk
and ephemera from my past, my parents
and theirs. What can I infer from such artifacts?
Their picture of history is idealistic, patched
and piecemeal, surmised, signage and objects
without context, cloaked in enigmatic clues
of stains, scuffs, creases.

The world is a reliquary. Dusty
centuries from now, will these words
exist? Will someone find a scrap
and peruse it like a knuckle bone
of a “typical American,” let alone “me”?

At home I stockpile albums of Daguerrotypes,
Grandma’s jewelry, drawers of letters, unpublished
manuscripts of my parents and great-grandfather.
The documents and relics they left
—the aspects they chose to preserve or hide
of their own lives and thoughts—
I weigh against the people I knew,
study and assay which truth, if any,
the story supports, and who might fit
the patchwork cloak.

1963: JFK and the French Mouse

It is, as is abundantly clear from the media blitz, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and that is also this week's Sepia Saturday theme (please visit that site for links to other thematic explorations!).

I was nine and a half when Kennedy died, and in the third grade. I remember the teacher, the white-haired but tall and sturdy Mrs. Geraldine Perry, in her typical peasant blouse and Mexican skirt, gathering the class around her that morning, and telling us that the president had been killed. One little girl burst out crying, and a few of the more churlish class members laughed at her. They got a very severe talking to, as I imagine Mrs. Perry, tough as she was, was probably close to tears herself.

As the grim spectacle unrolled on TV over the next few days, from the killing of Oswald through the long funeral proceedings, I was, I think, more concerned with the Kennedys' daughter Caroline, on whom I had rather a crush despite the fact that she was three years younger than I. In fact I had written a sort of cryptic paean to her just that summer, in the guise of a chapter of The Adventures of French Mouse. This was a project that I and my father had been working on for some months. Once a week or so we would sequester ourselves, and alternately he or I would dictate a story to the other, which I would then illustrate. The stories revolved around Pierre Souris, the French Mouse, with a supporting cast of my other Steiff animals, as well as a large sock monkey, named Uncle Monkey.

I now present for your Sepia pleasure the chapter in question.

"Queek, Caroline, open the you-know what!"

The cat looked terrible.

He made a death-defying leap.

He landed in the fountain.

French Mouse was peeking down the laundry chute when something struck him full-force in the nose!

A pink and blue sign on the door: No Mice Allowed.

The illustrations were dawn on the backs of class handouts for my father's Bible As Literature class at the University of Washington.

The text was written on the backs of a handout for his Intro To Poetry class.

Allow me to say in closing that the perennial trotting out of the JFK assassination "party line" irks me no end. I have just read a brand-new, phenomenal book, JFK and the Unspeakable, which thoroughly blows the old "lone gunman" theory sky-high. I cannot recommend this book too highly.

Going Over Old Times

Aunt Velma schooled us we should run in the field
when we got worked up, so as not to raise dust
in the house, which somehow managed always
to be just swept. So there we were,
playing at jousting, with Petey and Mort
on their invisible steeds they didn't want
to call just horses, holding branch lances
and going for each other like they hadn't
forgotten all the doublescrosses
they'd laid for each other in the past.
The dog and me were referee.


When everyone tired of knights we turned
to the day, like a grocer's thumb
on the earth. Even the trees which burst
out in yellow every so often
(you could smell "caution" on quiet days)
were grey, no buds, like spindly clouds.
I had a dog once looked like that,
the runt; he passed away unnoticed
almost, cause he was barely there
anyway. This was a runty day.


We fooled around the barn a good deal,
swinging on the rope from the rafters.
Mom brought it from Ohio where her Ma and Pa
used to tie it to the porch railing
in winter so you wouldn't get lost walking
from the house to the barn in a blizzard.
We all used it so we wouldn't stray
from the farm into the woods like we were tempted
to do on dumb days. Mom called it
"a headiness" that came over you in there,
so you'd walk for months without flagging,
and Percy and me knew it was the jays
who called you on and on from your home.
Even jays themselves have no home,
they've called each other away, following
those raggy cries up and down
from Salinas to Winnipeg. At any rate,
we kids stayed in the barn till suppertime.


And rain, which had been listening to the arguments
of gravity all the way down, hit
the drainpipe and said "Okay yessiree,"
agreeing to try the dry old earth for a spell.
We heard it during dessert, don't you know.

Stones: A Lesson

I considered, for Theme Thursday, a number of artsyfartsy nature shots but settled on this, one of my favorite photos from a trip I took with my son in 2005. (Not "local" but what the heck.)



This is looking down from the Acropolis across Athens. Three thousand years of human history in a single focal length, and perhaps a warning.