A Model for Catholic Girls

Saint Rose of Lima, shorn scalp razored,

skull fractured by your barbed metal crown,

did you greet your bed of pottery shards,

glass blades, and thorny spikes,

as a trembling lover does her beloved?

As you flogged your naked back

with leaden chains,

did the venerated links

spatter your holiness

against the walls

of your cell in the shape

of a bloody butterfly?

When your beauty caused you anguish,

did you sanctify the vitriol and lye

before you applied it to your beatific face?

Did you bless the exquisite trash

that was your bed before it pierced

your searing flesh?

What mystical bridegroom summoned your soul

to a place in your brain where ecstasy

ignited like a spark from your heel

caught in a steel trap

of a ring of hosannas?

My Father’s Sock Drawer 1965

“All this in a castle of air, the floating world of the assimilated who know and deny they will always be aliens.”  Adrienne Rich, Sources VII

A bored child, adrift in a brood of six,

I moped until given a task for little hands.

Veiled in the gloom of mahogany light,

I padded across my parents’ bedroom carpet,

reached the towering dresser.  Lemon-oiled

and shining, it contained the unmatched socks.

Eight people’s socks – a houseful of children

a pocket full of change.

My charge was to bring one bit of order

to that house of chaos:  match all our stray socks

in the room off the rail in that railroad-

flat stucco dream. 

Wedged between the foot of my parents’ bed

and the massive dresser, I nestled

in the fold of dusk’s fan, craving the dark.

Grabbing the bottom drawer’s brass pulls, I tugged,

coaxing the overstuffed drawer nearly open;

late afternoon silence was broken only by the clicking

of the pulls hitting the gleaming brass plate.

I burrowed into the drawer with arms wide

then scooped out dozens of mateless socks: 

navy blue knee socks of varying size,

bobby sox, black dress socks, blue baby socks.

Making certain to retrieve each odd sock,

I swept my small hands deep into the back

of the dark drawer and felt pebbled cardboard,

extracted it slowly and discovered

a portrait, studio formality out of place

in the bottom of a sock drawer.

A tall woman darker than sepia,

eyes unflinching, nose wide,

earlobes bobbing under the weight

of exotic dangling earrings

seems to want to toss out a hidden truth.

She was my Santa Rosa of the Sock Drawer.

My terra-cotta grandfather gazes straight at me

and loosely holds the brim of his straw boater.

Crossing his legs casually, he tells me:

“I belong here now.”

His coal hair is pomaded out of curl,

yet its waves betray the wiry texture.

And last, uneasy with studio potted palm,

wondering eyes squinting, Tío Francisco

regards me as if weighing the telling

of a tale to me, a little brown sock girl.

Had he not died on the cold Bowery

of this North American dream, I might

know the truth of our tribe, now hidden here

deep inside a dresser drawer of misfits.