Ettore (The Saint's Brother Remembers)

While visiting the sick in 1922, a missionary priest in Brazil entered the home

of a half-paralyzed Italian immigrant.  After hearing his confession, the priest

pointed to a picture over the man's bed, exhorting him to support his sufferings

as that holy girl from Lucca, Gemma Galgani, had.  The man began to weep.

His wife explained to the priest that her husband was Gemma's brother; he

had not seen his sister since leaving home in 1897.

                        from the Bollettino di Santa Gemma

Before I left, all I knew

of an immigrant's return

were men I'd see fall

out of an envelope, posed in a dinghy

beached on a photographer's floor.  I swore

I'd never be the Lucchesi

taking his turn

sailing home in a ridiculous boat—

I return wealthy or don't come back at all!

I left on a ship.  I won't return

in a skiff: dry-docked

memento for the altar back home.

?

What can I tell you—

My sister was good

but never a glow

I could read by.  Father died

so she fashioned a darkness

all the way to her ankles,

dropped to her knees

in the stained light of saints

till she was the stained light's shadow.

I remember her weeping

when she kissed me

goodbye.

May Gemma forgive me,

but I didn't give Christ my back

just to end up

His doormat.  He wipes mud off His feet

at the end of each day—

O Fazendeiro,

         capangas: The Lord and his thugs

                          patrolling their fiefdom

(my Gemma

tonguing coffee and tasting

the whole plantation),

the Lord and his thugs

all over us beating

everyone bloody, bleeding us dry.

?

For years she came in dreams;

she didn't tell me she was dead.

She'd ask me why I died—

I had never written home.

I was terrified she knew

the life outside my mind: dirt floor,

dirt house, dirt poor

sorting coffee beans all day.

Amazing not to see someone

just by opening your eyes.

?

I remember the night

a stranger brought me

my sister: Gemma wandering

through a book

trailing blood and an angel.

The door through which Jesus walked into Lucca —

I held her whole life in my hand.

I held her all night till I barely knew her,

till she was a story I had to return

to its lender.

What God lay dormant in her skin

until I left Lucca—

Until there was no one around

to stop her believing

Being alive is a sin.

?

When I came to Brazil

the limits of sorrow

were egg whites and sugar

the locals refer to as sighs.

Only later

suspiro meant longing,

meant one's last breath.

My blood sleeps inside my two dead sons

and all my wife's tears

won't ever wake it.  It's important

to marry a woman

who recognizes disaster—

Not Gemma

who thought creditors emptied

our apartment in Lucca

just to free up more space for God.

I thought I was the one

who had left,

but Gemma knelt where she stood,

got lost in Jesus—

How could either of us ever go back?

Catherine Sasanov is the author of two books of poems: Traditions of Bread and Violence (Four Way Books) and All the Blood Tethers (Morse Poetry Prize, Northeastern University Press).  She is also the librettist for the theater piece, Las Horas de Belen: A Book of Hours, commissioned by Mabou Mines.  Other poems from the Gemma Galgani poem cycle have been published in The Drunken Boat, Commonweal, Shade, Salamander, and are forthcoming in Quarter After Eight. Franciscan University Press published a chapbook selection of poems from her book-length poem cycle in August.  That chapbook is titled What's Left of Galgani.  The poem cycle itself (Reassembling the Bodily Relics of St. Gemma Galgani) is still a work in progress and is not yet published.

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