Mary Morris
FELLINI'S ROMA
(inside the ruins)
Red bison, yellow deer.
Within minutes the pigment fades, then dissolves from the sudden burst of air. Federico wears a miners hat, dirt, khakis, and boots. Darkness surrounds him. Federico is thinking fragment, delicate, the world of primitive and new, his mother’s Vespa, a modern chariot. It happens to be Ash Wednesday and he thinks of the Archbishop’s liturgy at the Vatican, from dust to dust. He thinks of catacombs, the beds of bones, of earth and salt, Mussolini and the eternal city. Fellini slides against the wall of rock in the cool, once sealed cavern, sits on the most ancient dirt of his country. He’s thinking bordello, the madrigal singers of Puccini, of opera, the baritone coming down the aisle, the way a storm enters a parched valley. He thinks of Mass, the confessional, three boxes—forgiveness in the middle of the two sides of sin. He thinks Chianti, fucelli, the way cypress grow in long neat rows along the road to San Pellegrino. He thinks about the lace of his wife’s black mantilla, of weight and measure, the way water fills in arched aqueducts, their scheduled holes, the ancient history in his blood moaning among the ruins, a sound and a feeling he will carry forever in his genes, a certain frantic attachment through the instantaneous separation of the departed from existence.
BOY
I envision The Dragons of Vortigern,
all the books I read to my ten year old son,
who has been a knight, king, captain of a ship,
Robin Hood stealing alms from my purse at midnight.
A dusty black dog breathes bear-heavy, next
to the side of his jeans, where pockets are filled
with boy’s treasure—mica, bone, empty diamond
skin of a snake, velvet grey feathers of a grackle.
He speaks to doves in the field.
They coo back.
And by the evening candle, the manx cat purrs
from his blessed hands
the way a lion does in the arms of Daniel.
MILAGROS
Each year I buy a milagro, a small silver amulet
of hope and a blessing— first a horse, then a heart,
a house and a bird, a tiny green Buddha,
and a dog that looks just like yours,
the one who stayed with you when you were four, lost
in the maize of arroyos, then found.
Miracles aren’t mysteries that happen
only in someone else’s time and place.
They happen constantly, each moment
folding into another, the way you came here,
the way you passed through my body like light,
became bones, flesh, and blood.
How strange in this techno world,
the x-rays of you inside
and outside of me
the miracle of diagnosis and survive,
how, in the book of grace, two bodies
turn to three, each of us alive.
AUTOBIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA
―after Frank O'Hara
When I was a child, I pretended to be a priest
and made Communion from coins of bread.
I practiced on my younger brothers―
all five of them, even the baby.
This is my body. This is my blood.
My mother caught me once
and scolded me for being sacreligious,
so I never told her that my older sister
was hearing confessions,
and we had to say, Bless me sister, for I have sinned,
before repenting to her Grace, for she was a Bishop.
And here I am, having always escaped
the organized matter of religion, listening
to the rich acapella of gospel, so believing
in the conviction of those voices!
Mary Morris is the winner of the 2007 Rita Dove Award. Her work has appeared in Quarterly West, Indiana Review, Blue Mesa Review, Red Rock Review, Nimrod, The Sun and many others. To solicit further work, contact WATER400@aol.com.
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