The Past a Sanctuary Staffed by Poltergeists

The tireless editors of ecclesial design

have rearranged the vestments in the closets

of your mind, and now it’s lousy paisley

couches cruising through the anterooms,

the transepts’ saintly portraits upside-down.

Most icons in the attics have already been

forgotten into boxes marked with gibberish,

the calligraphy of ghosts. There’s that squeal

like magic markers on cardboard sometimes—

faint, but your whole skull shivers: one more

bit of memoir, just the nimbus of a headache,

locked away or tumbled down your spine.

Surprising where you find a sacred fragment,

when you find one in the present.

Among the clammy delicates you transfer

to a dryer, maybe: junior high with the cool feel

of a phone cord coiled around your little finger.

Or once, in your husband’s kiss, leaf-scent

fragrant in a sweatshirt, as he held you in the wake

of several whiskeys. Incense on his tongue,

and then his mouth like marshmallows

and chocolates by a bonfire. Each kiss after

there was less of it. Only lips by morning.

You might think the poltergeists are cruel.

They hide the antiques one by one and dim

the white you were inside your first bikini.

They steal your mother’s fondness for azaleas

and install your in-law’s couches. Worse,

they’ve saved the vision of the childhood

friend who lost a thumb and finger to the ax

she found behind your father’s tool shed.

Girlish digits separated by the blade, her pink

face draining, and the minutes after—

screams turned inside-out, the sock you used

to try to staunch the bleeding: these in all

their gore for months beside your pillow

like what a cat drops crippled on a threshold.

But it’s not spitefulness why they cache

and disarticulate, why they stuff your fragile

keepsakes in the kneelers overnight.

And not an arbitrary shuffling of your life

they practice like malicious solitaire.

No, they’re priests who lack a scripture,

and this is how they’ve learned to worship

in the tall brick church that shadows you.

For a while one set of rituals was working.

Now they need others. Hence the ax

and couches. At times a stained glass

window is commissioned for a feast day

and for a while some cherished fire

will crackle in your head the way it used to.

Foolish though, to think the god they praise

is your biography. You’re architecture

and artifact and they will whittle you down

to relics. Your purpose is to call the tips

of fingers holy, to let the tinctured sun fall

on whatever they place at the altar, to pray,

when you pray, from any pew they choose.