It is said lilies nodded at the window,
from a vase on the vanity where she sat
admiring herself, her sky-blue eyes
and the high cheekbones her father praises
framed in the wimple of mother’s shawl.
Her mouth red from mother’s lipstick,
she had been playing dress-up,
having grown too old for her closetful
of dolls and board games and paints,
the picture books and puzzles.
Tired of make-believe, she wants to ask
if the boy next door can come for lunch
and wonders uneasily about all these lilies
sprouting, it seems, everywhere,
even between the tiles of her bedroom floor,
when suddenly a knock at the door
shakes the sign she’s posted there
(Private! Keep Out! This Means You!),
announcing the arrival of a stranger
lovely as the new girl at school.
He holds—what else?—a lily, kneels,
bows his head politely (though his eyes
never leave hers), then begins to speak
(it is like music) of things mother said
they would discuss when she is older.
Outside, where her swingset rusts,
the rain that beat the flowers down all morning
has stopped. Suddenly the yard
is filled with doves, and the grass has grown
very green, the sky very blue.
You’d think they’d never seen a baby
or a woman before, blushing as they are,
the sweet, bumpkin things they say,
as though her child were a lamb.
Watching him sleep, she wonders
all the usual things, what his first
words, say, will be. It is said
hers were “O Deus, ego amo te”!
She’d forgotten that family story
until the stranger who called
nine months ago reminded her,
but how did he know the things he knew?
He’d told her then about the cattle lowing
in the dead of night, the shepherds,
the lilies out of season, the name
they’d choose—and it all has been just so.
He said he was the angel Gabriel, but all
she knows is that he had about him that day
the oddest glow, and when he appeared
there was suddenly from somewhere music.
The shepherd boys who’ve made her room
their own have grown sleepy, and she too
is nodding off. She looks to put out
the light, the softest, warmest light
she’s ever seen. It seems to spill
from the cradle, from somewhere just
above her head, from the chair where Joseph
snores in the otherwise darkened room.
Shadows move like blue doves in the rafters,
and every mundane object in this light
is beautiful, as though the world
had fallen for once in love with itself.
She thinks she’s looking good again,
the way she looked when she was single,
her face in the window’s mirror
a portrait by Botticelli or Richard Avedon,
though this has, she suspects,
something to do with the odd light
now constantly gathering about her,
its intense, painterly quality.
However that may be, it is true
someone is always falling by to ask
over the ceaseless hammering
from the garage (where Joseph turns
all his nervous energy into chairs
and vanities) if he might “do her.”
Usually she acquiesces though already
the walls are plastered with their efforts.
Like the carved and chiseled likenesses
filling the basement, the paintings all look
much the same to her, their titles silly
and unimaginative—Madonna of the Goldfinch,
Madonna of the Fish, Madonna with Angels.
There must be three dozen called Madonna and Child.
(She put a stop to that—all that sitting around
was not good for a small boy).
Now she sends Jesus down to the store,
or out to help his father plane and varnish,
whenever some Italian or German-speaking genius
arrives with his brushes and apprentices
to pose her “just so” in her favorite chair
and slave until they lose the light,
then spends the evening drinking wine
with Joseph and talking frames.
Studying the paintings, she supposes Joseph
responsible for some of the details—
the star, the more-or-less accurate description
of that flea-bag motel, those useless gifts
of frankincense and myrrh. But who, she wonders,
told these guys about the lilies, the angel,
or the way the sky that day
turned such a funny shade of blue?
He is a filthy little man
with eyes like Charlie
Manson’s, but he has a halo
just like hers (a nuisance
she’s grown used to long ago)—
as he wades into the water,
away from the small crowd
whose neglected cattle low
on the darkening hillside.
What John’s up to she can’t guess,
nor that angel—the same one
again—who’s just arrived
to hold her son’s red blazer importantly
while he follows after John,
just as the setting sun
turns every tree into a cross
and the water—where several men
sit fishing and a woman
washes clothes—into blood.
As she turns for home
where she should be busy
fixing supper, she notices
John’s halo floats
above his head like a platter
and that in the distance
beyond the farm-cluttered
hills and evening chores
the sky has turned again
that otherworldly blue.
She tosses, groans,
the pillow damp,
her legs snaking
beneath the twisted,
sheets of the safe
bed, of lightning
whiplashing across
the sky, lost
in an hallucination
of soldiers
and sinister locals,
cowed friends
and bodiless,
gawking angels,
the pale sun lost
to abrupt dark,
all color draining
from the world.
His resignation,
his bravado and
inhuman
forgiveness
washing over
the crowd,
she shrinks
from the storm’s
eye, turns
in the tangled
sheets, her face
frozen
in disbelief,
by her belief
from deep within
this nightmare
that having allowed
such a thing
has been, if it
was anything,
to sin,
by her suddenly
knowing why
the sky was always,
like her eyes,
that terrible shade
of blue.
Caught in the absolute
black of sleep
between one sun
and another,
she moans,
the nightmare
inescapable,
the final scene—
her son now
in her arms, his
splintered body,
her bloody dress—
frozen, time
falling away
like a camera
pulling back,
leaving them
a tableau
of defeat
in the provinces,
the birthdays,
the supper-time
laughter, a child’s
in the night
lost in events
that cannot
contain them,
both of them
inhuman now, dim
as a painting
needing restoration,
the sky giving way
to blank stretches
of canvas, her sorrow
fading to grey,
the paint
flaking bluely
even from her eyes.
She always had to laugh whenever
Anne and the others reminisced.
Jesus was in fact such a bad boy—
like the day the neighborhood kids
made fun of him and he got the bushes
behind the ball field to beat them into tears
(later, Joseph had to do the same,
paddling the boy’s small bottom
with his halo until it almost broke)
or the times they caught him showing off,
asking in church impossible questions
or pretending to raise the dead.
But this last trick was anything
but funny, appearing to her where she sat
exhausted after months without a word,
her letters all returned “addressee unknown,”
the days of gossip and insinuation,
and these last nights of nothing but bad dreams—
her son arrested in the dead of night, whipped
and mocked, tried and executed, his friends
avoiding her, and the one found hanged.
Then there he stood, smelling of the grave,
in his feet and hands bloody holes, his side
split open, his face scratched and bleeding.
But more mysterious was what he said
as he turned to leave with that angel waiting
in the failing blue of evening. “Fear not,”
he whispered, “I’ve come so that you’d know
that everything I did and said was true
was true.”
She lies drowning in the pool
of her gown, surrounded
by so many haloed men
the room’s brightness
hurts her eyes.
She regrets, too late of course,
neglecting the other children,
but the entire business
so constantly bewildered,
his saws and hammers his only comfort.
Thinking about such things,
thinking against the soporific
she’s been given,
she cannot shake the feeling
she is no one’s mother
and everyone’s, her son’s wife,
two fathers’ daughter,
and ghostly if here at all.
She would like to talk
about this bafflement
that makes her forget
what she wants to remember—
her son’s first step,
first tooth, first word—
but Anne (Saint Anne now,
like everybody else she knows)
is dead and these old men
so somber, thumbing even now
their small, thick books
and staring heavenward.
They don’t, she thinks, see
a thing, don’t have a clue.
For them, it’s all make-believe,
the sort of thing the magi do
every weekend at the Rivoli.
She studies her hands
afloat on the gown’s cool surface,
the same hands
rubbed her round belly,
and felt the beauty once
of her own cheekbones
as she sat self-raptured
before the bedroom mirror.
Above her and this crowd
of Dutch uncles
she thinks she sees
that superior angel again,
Gabriel, she believes
he said his name was
(there have been so many,
really, who’ve called).
He is getting to be a nuisance
worse than any halo.
He looks years older,
but she notices
he still has his damned lily—
this time pinned to his lapel—
and that he’s brought his friends along—
Michael, Uriel, Raphael,
and those three
who never said their names.
It must be the medicine,
because they look as though
they are parting clouds
where the raftered ceiling
used to be,
revealing someone
who looks, she thinks,
(or so it is said)
He is holding their son
and gazing sadly down
into her sky-blue eyes
as though upon a world
that until now he thought
he had only imagined,
and in which he had never
quite believed.