Basilique Notre Dame, Ottawa

My life: bits of smashed

glass

in a bloody mire.


I lift them up here. My

arms

seem very long today.


Up go all the filthy fragments

of me

into the royal buttressed blue.


Look! Fistfuls of dirty shards

arise

and come down again as stars,


as a constellation: my life

arrayed

behind and before,


all her molecules

scoured

and reassembled,


a jewelled system in the

dark air,

imperceptibly orbiting.