click book
Infanta
by
Erin Belieu

               the clean, planetary light glowing
                       off its mirrored walls

                                       Whose is the first face?


Whose the ghost memory,
     root the cold soul retains,

    waiting in her waiting
        room of wind and stars?
               

                   What does spirit, thread
                    knotted to the gristle
                    of a body,
                                      require?


A bone is made of something,
a vein, a heart—

                          and who do they remember?

If I love
                the color of a melon's
                     green belly—

If I want

         to scrape the bright pulp
             from its skin,

             to consider this
                 in my own mouth—



                                      do you blame me?




                    How to love one

soul and not
another—

It is the art
         I never figured.



                                                    ***

I do not remember

a time when I did
not believe in duty—

         my mother's coin
         placed in my father's purse,
         my sin was, finally,

Pride, for I knew
and was pleased by
all that had been paid
                    for me—

and if,
on my wedding day,
those massive doors fastened

                   as a figured lid stoppers
                   the mouth of its urn;

if the church
cooled to a catacomb,

and the dust motes that baffled
in the little sun bleeding
through the great
altar window

          swirled grayly
          like a rain of ash—

do not call this a sign.

Hell is an honest temple,
          and love the amnesia

which allows me to forget
                    nothing—

                                                 ***

And this one,

who will never leave
        my side—


I do not say his name.



               (What better proof
                 that He contains both
                 the divine and diabolical?)


                The punishment for love
                            is love:


Weeping has
undressed him,
while suffering mines
his beauty


                as the silk digs
                white and weightless
                from the milkweed's
               

brittle husk—
and though the wind drives us
together,

               we are not doves;

we never touch.



For I

            am made the author
                   of this story—



I do not say his name.



The only sacrifice
He would take from me

          is a broken spirit.

Cephalophore
                   —for Dennis

Halfway up Montmartre,
the German woman props herself
on a portable chaise
and slips off her bikini top
below the Holy Virgin, who prays
from Her burbling fountain shrine.

French Boy Scouts shimmy
along Her edifice, vying
for an aerial view,
and I, too, hump up the hill,

the steepest hike in Paris,
where St. Denis first lost and then
acquired his higher, patronly purpose—

dead, he walked the city's length,
carrying his freshly severed
head like a martyr's receipt of sale.
Denis: one of the cepbalophore,
a category of stubborn saints
who don't lie down until they choose the grave.

Inside the church, the vaulted
chambers are terminally green,
sno-globed in shadowed dust. I pause
before a pile of melting votives—
squat offerings, anonymous
as organ donations—

and think we raise a host
of inadvertent corpses when
we name a child,
because you're here—

without my even calling,
you come: a boy, too smart, small,
astringent as a lemon,
your fine, wooden posture
already rigid, redolent
of dignity and persecution.
You who answered all questions honestly,
who stood foolishly
when you could have run.

In the flames' blue-bottomed
tongue, I see the three shack-trash
brothers who lived across our road,
how, one by one, they'd come
to beat your ass, as if
you were the task at hand.

                         And you,

standing fat-fipped, patient,
beneath the stunted ash tree
our father never could coax
to grow, facing your accusors,
who shouted "Pussy!
Fag!' then raced back home.

But that's sentimental evidence
for your unlikely veneration—
if childhood misery made
pilgrims elect, we'd each have a congress
of apostles stumping at the Vatican.

Our mother says
she had no one in mind when
she filled in your birth certificate,
so I dump my pocketful of francs
into the tithing box with no request
for signs or miracles. Maybe just

a place in the spiritual
catalogues for partial incarnations,
for the image, struck clear
and cheap as a holy medal,

of a long-gone boy
not named for a distant saint,
and the consecrated style with which
he carried himself, searching for
the grave to take his suffering.

__________________________________________________________________________

ERIN BELIEU is the author of Infanta (Copper Canyon, 1996), which was selected in the National Poetry Series. Her second book (click title) One Above and One Below, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in April of 2000. New poems have appeared in Grand Street, TriQuarterly, and Boulevard.

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