from The Book of Marys and Glaciers

I.

I went all the way to the museum and then another museum and then another. To discover the same thing, around the world: Mary is never alone. There she is with a baby. There she is with so many angels. Wise men. A dying son. Mary is always host. Her body too.

The ocean knows no age but the sand that is our raw inheritance. And Mary’s inheritance is generations of purity. Our lady of no choice. Our lady of our sorrows. Our lady who never knows solitude. Never knows silence. Our voices always in her ears. The company of angels always a bit too much. To be adored is to be surrounded.

When she comes to me, I am always alone. A woman alone is entirely herself. A woman alone leaves excess in her wake, every portion too big. In the company of others, she takes up no space, but alone, she is the space. Alone, she watches the dogs of the city, off-leash. She runs toward a foreign language. No longer surrounded by men, she is not mother, not sister, not womb. Not prayers to the fruit of. She is just a woman in blue with a tall glass of wine in a walled city, envying its pigeons.

II.

I was a girl who gilded in the margins wore the face of the past. When I was a child, I misheard hail as hell. Say your hell Marys. The hellish din, the noise of all the demands of the repentant, the preying of prayer.

Within the catacombs, they claim an image of the first Mary, as though there was no other Mary before. No other whose pulse was motherhood, whose sorrow was a helplessness. Mary’s life begins at conception and ends at resurrection. And mine begins with pity. To give pity is to give opportunity. Another word for begging, for the afterlife or half-life of want. The mother of Mary, a virgin. The mother of the mother, a virgin. This machine makes Marys.

III.

We could be made from trees. Born of ideas or metamorphosis. Transubstantiated in a drop of water. A slow-moving block of ice. Birth pains and death pains. Metal city forests and their copper glow. Knitting. Unrolling a ball of string. The womb and cords. We come to bury in the afterbirth. The after death. Collecting blood from the side. Lancing the tumor of ego. Pushing our fingers through the rotten wood. Alone with age. Alone with our thoughts. Stormwater and Mary quite contrary. You may not know this about me, but I was a very important woman. The supernatural bride problem. The Mary-go-round. Wind farm. Server farm. All of us mining the bite.

IV.

Mary speaks six times in the Bible, each one barely a sentence. Among her quotes: “They have no wine.”

V.

The book of Mary’s repose. And the dream of the underground tunnel system in my backyard. At the end, my father, always with a glass of water. We’d be the first people the pilgrims would see after days alone in the shadows. It’s quiet in the blue conflict. Say dark. The drone of masonry, brick, the dust of insulation, our coverage, our shelter. The paragraph of frustration ringing the lip as you coo. Prohibit the jackhammer, the tree, the raging gas of the neighbor’s blower, the kin of leaves and dirt. The big sword mouth of life. Consume the kit, the zoo, the menagerie of our collective stubbed toes. Cover yourself for the trip.

VI.

I wanted to write about Mary, but then I became distracted by the glaciers. The things that glaciers do. The angels too loud, too surveillant. The glaciers, always alone, even when we were so close, reaching our hands off the bow to scoop the ice. They were at a remove. Unable to be fathomed. Austere and foreboding and vulnerable and slowly calving with a roar or a sigh. The weight of it all; the abuse of it all. I made myself tall enough to get in the frame with the glacier. On my toes, I was here. I came to watch the earth crumble and slowly slide against itself. This is work, this labor, the cracks of something so large it can only break.