Virgin Mary has never ventured

to the caves of Texas

where bats—little shudders—

breed like bad memories.

She has none,

you know, no packed bags

at the Union Station

where bats press themselves flat

against the peeling ceiling.

No shuddering regrets electrify

her epidermis like the flit of

a donkey’s ear.

This defines her innocence:

the sadness she feels for souls

consigned to places always cold

where the only lights are those

flickers of conscience

we bring with us.

 

She did it only once and that

was a Eucharistic moment,

the apotheosis of grace,

as if her womb were lined

with Communion wafers.

It’s God the Father, the Son, and the

Holy Spirit

in there, swallowed, perhaps, and

passed, with a kiss,

through nether lips.

 

Virgin Mary never goes where she is unwanted.

She bows her head to the ecstatic

eradicators, tribe haters, sex haters,

haters of the poor.

If her hovel is bulldozed, she has a cousin

in Babylonia -- although moving, for Virgin Mary,

predicates cosmological occurrences, avian messengers—

and then there are the tickets

and checkpoints.

 

 

Eugenie—“u” that is not me, the euphonious ululation of you, a cursive that balances cheek and lip and tip of nose.  I must pronounce it like the French do with a cry in the middle, a blending of consonants: jhay. And then the tongue at the ridges of roof, and the release in exhalation.  It moves me. Eugenie.

 

Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III, a Spanish Catholic, populizer of the basket crinoline and papal power and Maximillian of Mexico.  That wasp waist beneath the v of banded necklines, and v of chin and parted hair, smooth wings.  Eugenie, whisper your name over left and right shoulders as to angels: keep and protect me.

 

Eugenie, daughter of Marie Bonaparte, princes of Greece and Denmark. Bone a part, buono part-ee, Napoleon’s grandniece via his brother, Lucien.  Frigid, she measured the centimeters from clitoris to vaginal opening.  Short equals voloupte, long: no fucking way.  She paid a quack to have her clitoris moved closer, but no shebang.  Did it again.

 

Eugene was a boy trained in the classics in the valleys of the Blue Ridge, truly blue.  You, Gene, sit right char in that chair. You my first vessel: brilliant, sensitive, destined.  If only I could put on a Eugene shirt and trousers and walk downtown.  Me, caring less about the narrative except the train to New York, the pencil and paper, success, yess, yess.  Eugene a miasma of projected self as I sat at the Shake Shop’s formica counter—gold stars bound by lathing chrome—and ate ham lettuce and tomato and drank some ice tea to the tune of  Freddy Fender. “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights.”

 

For I have left you far behind.

 

The Shit Shack, we called it.

 

You, Gene, a stalk green from the soft earth, graduating white as scallion. Crisp.  A blossom trumpet of lily, the orange stain, the freckling stamen.