GERTRUDE SUITE
GERTRUDE OF HELFTA ON SUFFERING
Semantic, in the way that interruption is semantic.
Memory strikes at it.
To burn or to cleanse.
Choice says, take me there, sister. Choice insists.
*
It is not a door, though it knows the word door.
Door, it says.
Door door door door. If only it were that simple.
*
An allusion, as to some other form of listening.
Or, it is a way of making lists,
viz. letters, numbers, the planets, the five wounds.
*
It asks, whatever can “authenticity” really mean.
GERTRUDE OF HELFTA AT THE NEEDLE
Run into what the field prays,
its golden sequence.
Marriage lapses like this.
A haunting
towards which
small boats hurl their casks.
A median.
Architectured smartly.
What privilege we have sewn.
GERTRUDE OF HELFTA ON EPISTEMOLOGY
That light. We could see by it.
If it were closer.
If we were closer.
The roses only get in the way.
GERTRUDE OF HELTA ON PHOTOGRAPHY
But we had not arrived.
We were in the act of arriving.
The light accommodated us.
Later, regret.
It is so soft. You
can touch it with your hands.
GERTRUDE OF HELFTA ON THE ATONEMENT
A mirror for sorrows. In that, a tool.
Events are what happened.
How do you know?
Well, the stain. The correspondence.
But chiefly the correspondence.
Whether we call it a noun or a mote.
[MECHTHILD SAYS GOD IS A BELL]
Mechthild says God is a bell:
she blushes: a little
shower falls onto the bean
plants rooted in moist loam:
a net leads upwards,
we can climb if if we like:
we can tighten
the constellation:
asceticism is one form
this tightening might take:
if it’s a question
of taking: of asserting
possession: I take the bean
blossoms into my hand:
now they’re implicated
in the fable:
I teach them about battles,
Algiers, Antietam, Warsaw:
what you can’t
name in the clouds
is not the cloud itself
(Mechthild might have said):
because bride:
because even the streets
decked out in scarlet rags:
violets stretched across
the nave of her best thought:
relinquished,
she said: beneath
the desolation (she said)
of the missing: the non-
decaying absence:
what cavitates
inside the sorrows of birds,
about which we know
next to nothing:
a motif, say,
by Isaac, subfusc smudge
against damask, otherwise
left to its single prayer:
its orphan-recital
the sleepers know by heart:
LAZARUS
stained
earshot
branch
cloth
cinnabar
votary
messenger
blame
abacus
rudder
hyphen
spline
baryon
lemma
exquisite patternings on the wings of moths visible only from below
stained
did I mention stained
a book burned him (accounts differ) in the soft meat of the inner arm
