Natural History of the Soul
The song thrush hops, runs, stands,
the guide book says, with its head to one side
listening for worms
just as the lion knew to follow St. Jerome
calmly while they
walked through the priests
who are running for their lives
in Carpaccio’s painting in Venice,
birds opening their beaks
hoping to touch St. Francis who was a lover of views,
especially the one visible from his
home in high Assisi
until natural beauty failed him altogether
once he’d almost died
which turned him
utterly exclusively to concentrate on what can happen
mind-to-mind—body-to-body if you’re lucky.
Barring that
we can’t even hear an earthquake coming,
a volcano at the start
throwing its boulders up
the endless-seeming chimney to the hole
that can be the size of a human head
—as one man learned when he
crawled down
into the crater to see—
or three miles in circumference.
