Relics

I know how to do this.

You place your spectacles over your eyes

and peer into dim corners, light colored

and touching stones around your feet.

The thing itself astonishes time into stillness,

hushes years of chatter, 

clarifies the mind like wine.

You do your homework, diligent skepticism

set like a skull on your desk,

thinking about blood types and pollens

and weaves, radiocarbon rates of decay,

fistsful of forgeries panting across Europe,

St. Helena's brilliant rock-star luck

with Eusebius' adoring tongue hanging to his chin.

You see what light falls across

time's hard bones.

But Faith is a prism, scattering light you cannot see by,

a flower that opens and dies,

opens and dies,

a paroxysm of meaning that never tells

what the thing is you have believed,

only what it was you were

standing before opaque reliquaries

where your sight came and went.

Comments

[Michelle]

Beautiful.