Floating City Reliquary by Kate Falvey

We didn’t kiss in this garden,
chanced upon in the crook
of a stony passageway,
deliberate blue of a Venetian midnight
winding like mysterium fidei
through our young and jokey nerve.

We knew little enough of reverence
for irreverence to be more than pale pretend,
sloughing ungainly Catholic sins with tentative
bravado, the sufferance of the saints, whose eyes
watched and watered from the brinks
of tortuous calles, not easy to defy or evade.

We had seen Catherine’s bones
silvered in St. Dominic’s,
when we swaggered through Siena,
backpacks scruffy with Florentine dust.
Something in her luminous sockets
chilled our burbling mockery.

You whispered guidebook highlights:
She died at 33.
Maybe anorexic,
dreamt of falling into fires
and Christ’s foreskin
as her bridal ring.

“Foreskin?” I retorted, snide.
“How would that be managed? Cut
like a calamar’?” and so the spell
was splintered into cheap, unholy groans,
hushed with moderate politeness
but wholly without foresight.

We didn’t know a relic from a cut-rate rosary
hawked ecstatically to tourists in the holy hell
of August. We didn’t figure on recalling
all we missed. Or what a sacred loneliness
would well in that lost kiss. Or what skeletal
devotions would rattle these late days.

Our breath splayed the claustrophobic shadows,
scraping rough chinks in the dead end dark,
the eagle-winged lions too far away to mark
the crossroad of our reverential shock
when a wilderness of cyclamen and light-
blanched climbing roses mooned in a sudden arch –

White oleander poured from rusted rails
scenting the tiny grotto with lemon and vanilla
and the ascent of those roses wreathed
a white-faced Madonnina, bleached
but still flaked with dateless blue and gold.

And suddenly we are old.

I stroll the byways now by day, the city
in November lapped by threats of acqua alta.
The garden stumbled on again,
abandoned, frowzy, desolate,
not the stuff of miracles
or memory.

Our lady, faceless, nearly formless,
rubbed to a mound of stony bitten ghost
lists toward a vaguely westerly laguna
as if veiled and in contemplative repose, shaping
the stillness with her shapeless sempiternal gaze,
the air unmoved and blank with benediction,

watching over all that never happened.

………………..

Kate Falvey's work has been fairly widely published in journals and anthologies; in a full-length collection, The Language of Little Girls (David Robert Books); and in two chapbooks. She co-founded (with Monique Ferrell) and edited the 2 Bridges Review, published through City Tech/CUNY, where she teaches, and is an associate editor for the Bellevue Literary Review.