Milagra
Audrey
Santo sits in Worcestor,
more like she reclines
with her twisted absentee grin.
She is a hobbled body
bringing hope in the form of oils
raining down from the arches,
the stairwell and the fireplace,
slickening the hard-wood floors
for the barefoot visitors,
the citizens, her public.
Audrey
Santo sits in Worcestor,
more like she reclines,
a stymied icon, but life-sized
and pristine in doilied royal garments,
her ladies in waiting mating faith to felicity
as they wring their arthritic hands.
Praying, praying, praying
for the sine qua non that no one can create.
Audrey causes a frenzy with her blessings.
Her mother clears the corners
and opens the doors, ringing in the constituency
and clicking the number-cruncher as they come.
Audrey
Santo sits in Worcestor,
more like she reclines,
prone and maligned
by the seldom bold skeptics that refuse her.
Everyone loves her.
People feed her their bleeding hearts
and gnaw upon their fingernails, their knuckles,
shuffling and bucking in unison
and awaiting the good wraith, the blue silk cape,
the ruddy cheeks and the pluming effusion of rose petals.
Her father,
her aunts work as a team.
Campaign Santo for Canonization 2000.
It's a simple enough trick with a built-in slogan
a Spanish surname to die for,
glowing on the bumper stickers and round pins,
drifting in from every direction toward that unlikely hub.
Letters and V.I.P. visits, legislators and
bishops, dignitaries, poets and physicians
they often file in on official and unofficial business.
They meter the walls, swathing their cotton balls
and popping their flash bulbs
amidst a crowd of neo-Pentacostals.
Believers
and cynics, they are equally engaged.
Little innocent Audrey has all the experts stumped.
But for
all the dire admirers
with their lupus and their slipped disks
terminal cancers and sciaticas
little Audrey Santo sits in Worcestor,
more like she reclines,
and knowing nothing of her own last name
wishes and hopes with her lock jawed mind
frozen forever at age three
for any kind of feeble release from her holiness -
a simple smile, a trip to the zoo,
the cool, sticky lick of an orange popsicle,
the unhallowed touch of her mother.
Bang
the Drum Slowly
Rhythm
in the midst of your winnings,
a sense of memory blessed.
These things come together but once a year.
From all sides, the diphthongs come knocking,
and the doors collide.
You play it out again at every venue -
on a sound stage or night club proscenium,
or sometimes just in your head,
with your
pen pressed flat against your hand.
You sketch a pick-up prison:
a five man band, no keyboard,
only the stringed instruments
and two metallic pie plates for a high hat.
The sheet music bleeds into an oil puddle.
Wherever
your father slept, there is now this -
a purplish swirl, a foot print.
The drumsticks splinter.
Your hands break open
into promises left in a line, alphabetized.
The family fell in a tumble from your stunned lips,
and you blew the farthest, drifting city to city
on silver bullet of blame: he made me.
Now there's
a melted plant stand in your bathroom,
atop which his picture swims
in a gray frame with a shattered backing.
When you think of him, you feel your heels on fire.
A swiftness and a light switch,
the hot breath of two a.m.
and the earliest humming beat of your hands against his side.
Copyright © 2000 Kristen Havens
