Self-Portrait in Green with Collateral Damage and Eucharist
after Saint Hildegard of Bingen
The truly holy person welcomes all
that is earthly, the cut worm and the dirt
in the wound, the tripped land mine and the field
exploding into limitless orange light.
You might spend your whole life looking for God
in the cracked spine of a Russian novel,
in the plié before the twirl of a grief,
in the sound of splitting wood and sunrise.
You would be wrong to think that the soul coils
within the body; rather, the body
glides within the soul. If you reach your hands
outside the window of the self, you might
touch it with the tip of your ring finger,
leave the whorl of a cosmos with your print.
Someone’s chanting from the darkest corner
of the monastery inside your chest.
Open the tabernacle door, sister:
you are the marrow, you are the music
inside the bone, you are a tree growing
through the eye socket of the first man’s skull.
