Original Prompt 2, Week 3

“Spun on the sprung reflections caught in a stranger’s eye/ Year after year,/ you would not imagine yourself if you could,/ Peninsulaed as you are, and rare.”

Charles Wright, “To the Egyptian Mummy in the Etruscan Museum at Cortona”

Ubaldo, white and gold, smoldering in glass, and gold, and the cathedral that pulls the penitent and tourist alike up the mountain as if they were angels in iron cage and wire. Ubaldo’s feet slant to the right, face the faces that have flown up for intercession and the cold wood benches. A gold and white hat balloons from his dark face. It is white, unlike his body, but it is waxy, like his face and hands, which are the only parts of Ubaldo that can feel the stale air of the glass case. It has been centuries, Ubaldo, what would you have seen, if you could see? Much more than the pale worshipper who edges out when our group emerges from the heavy doors. But maybe not much more than so many giant wooden candles, unflickering red on the backs of young men, the race for you, the climb, without wing or wire, up the mountain. You did not always rest here, so close to blank sky, unable to see it. When they raised your body with tissue paper hands, could you see Gubbio grow small beneath the soft slippers on your rigid feet, the city of wool, and wolf.

Original Prompt 1, Week 3

“After my father’s death, I knock/ on my mother’s door,/ me four feet tall, red leather purse in hand,/ fingers soft as bread/ and tell her I am headed to a nunnery.”

“Nineteen, wandering in the Himalayas, at a monastery/ in the clouds, I had just drunk the water/ from a stream hoping to get sick, sitting/ at the feet of a monk/ whose skin I groped the night before”

from Adrie Kusserow, “Hunting Down the Monk”

The year my mother’s brain lost itself in the heat, I marked the big stocky stone square in front of my school, erected to so-and-so and now, Megan. The bulky thing was scribbled all over, a fount of words to learn at eleven years old, and what was it, to add my name, just the first? And somehow they caught me, somehow I walked into the assistant principal’s office and burst into tears as the fat man serenaded me to “I Go to Pieces.” Twenty-two, wandering in Umbria, at the aqueduct that arches over Spoleto, linking cheap caffe corecto to the sacred mountain, I find myself in the city of spray paint, in the country of graffiti. Italy, where every ruin carries Latin in its soft mouth and the side streets wear “Hotboys” on brick slowly turning to dust. Even the aqueduct is full of words, claims of location and forever, and I have no desire to write on these monuments to ruined beauty. Climbing Montelucco, sharp stone pierces rubber. In the sacred forest, I let the rain strip my fingerprints from the bark. I brush my labored steps off the mountain as I descend. I don’t want to mark this city, want to return to my own spoiled cement unmarked, but Spoleto’s circled maze, its weed-ridden roofs, terra cotta molding to spotted sinking sun and sky, erects its aged, incorruptible elegance, its dome, its cranes, its lower city, all in my skull, bone collecting location and forever.

Memory 1, Week 3

In Nicaragua, we were stationed in a small village in Padre Ramos where chickens muttered behind hunchback chain link fences and ocean waves hit dark, dirty sand all night and where there was stucco it was brightly painted. There were two two-story wood ranchos on the little camp property our missionary—who asked me to call him Papa T—had built, segregated by gender. Their roofs were an elaborate, dense interlacing of palm fronds, elegant and beautiful. We ate underneath the boys’ rancho in the open salt wind, plastic tables on sandy cement. In the humid night of the dive bombing cicadas, my youth pastor, Ross “Coop” Cooper, a big bald man who crossed his eyes and smiled in every picture and rolled an electric blue bowling ball with a plastic skull inside, dared us to put a cicada in our mouths. I of the worm and the baby bird, of our fear factor nights in the thin carpeted industrial church space back home, always ready to take a dare. My fist close around the chirp, I carefully hid the bug inside my mouth. Closing my lips, it went silent, and when I opened my mouth, it began its frantic chirping again. When I came back from that trip, I lied on Coop’s couch and bawled the entire day.

Image Junkyard 4, Week 3

We swing soft in iron as our birdcages rise on wind and wire up the mountain. We pierce the heavy bellied sky, sun pouring on Gubbio, grubby Gubbio, full of grace. I have learned gothic is God as architect, but I know we got it wrong, we made it too beautiful. The dome glints over its giant wood candles painted an unflickering red. A saint smouldering in glass and gold, Ubaldo’s feet slant sideways in bright thread, resting on feathers.

Image Junkyard 3, Week 3

A Japanese group moves through the mist of rain in another maze of a town, another one of St. Francis’s towns. They are swathed in black plastic monk robes to their feet, clinched in white sneakers. Their mouths tighten around their vows of silence, listening in on Daniela’s explanation of the canals, the wash of her words, dirty English.

Image Junkyard 2, Week 3

Gubbio, the cathedral. Weeds grow around a rose window where a pigeon huddles, a black stone. Lightbulbs shine dim as pearls in wreaths of metal shells. Windows are painted shut with dark cloud. Francis’s arm is raised, permanent as the whimpering metal in his lap, the wolf snout caught forever in lockjaw submission. At the pulpit, under the bright stains, Christ’s lacquered ribs glow.