Epilogue to ‘Stigmata’
A blade
into your chest,
who drove it in?
An angel, I have said,
if there are angels.
Dante,
on the first
anniversary
of his grief,
drew an angel,
Beatrice
clear in his mind still.
Disturbed – ‘Someone
was just with me,’ he said –
he went on drawing, drawing
not yet writing.
You draw what you see,
but at times
not with the eye.
Dante, drawing,
knew her alive and,
knowing it,
wrote his poem.
Wounded,
writing it. For to see
without the eye
is to be pierced,
knife in the sternum.
Even so the angel
at La Verna
drove insight
into St Francis’ side,
hands, feet.
So Pio. So Teresa.
Consummatum est
in the place of the skull.
You, walking with death,
know that place,
you who were there
in the cinema
looking away, sitting
that furnace of an afternoon
beside me but apart,
and it was then
I knew what I know.
Call it angel, call it love,
whatever:
the shaft
driven down into my body,
heart, bowels.
Too pure for me, you may be,
yet too wild – Eros
in each of us
diversely fierce –
too strong, too frail, too
holy not whole,
scourged by sorrow,
wounded by love –
but the shaft driven
into me, through me,
that tube of nothing,
fills with a long cry:
I, I love you, love you, love.
I, I love you, you.