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THE GARGOYLES OF SAINTE-CHAPELLE
Even the king needed gargoyles to defend his chapel. Inside, the statues of the apostles, each holding a circle with a cross, in the upper chapel, those windows telling stories from the Bible and then the one of the king buying the relics, which is read in the shape of an S, and, on the west wall, the Rose Window, which tells the story of the apocalypse, though what we see is the living flower, the animals, the grass, inimitable blue, and even through the dark and rain the asymmetrical but balanced light. Outside, gargoyles reach out from the walls, those two who look like women, one almost a girl, known to be hideous so they could protect the church from evil-- a few hours before, your mouth on my breast, I thought it was another mouth I’d tried to forget, one that set me forever apart from being human-- tell me who knows the windows best, the king in his special seat, under the crowning of the kings of Israel, or the gargoyles turned outward, into the light that crowns them? |
MOTH
Is the soul solid, like iron? Or is it tender and breakable, like the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl? —Mary Oliver I had the idea that if it happens early enough, when the soul is still forming (it happened when I was getting my soul), it’s like a leaf that is stamped and as the leaf grows it retains that imprint, so that part of it is not its own. You said, your soul is whole and clean, but then why does it feel like it belongs to someone else, that child waiting quietly in bed for him to come in and say goodnight? Wouldn’t a real soul have gotten up and walked out? Into the black trees, the lake, even if it was cold. But like a human it craved warmth, predictability. |
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NOTRE DAME
I remember Styrofoam cups by a coffee maker. The detritus of a business as though it was just a business like any other, the rows of storage units that I ran down once, twice, in the hot sun. The smog from the highway. Seagulls overhead. Even there it was not that far from the ocean. But I remember being on my knees in front of him, the man my parents brought, over and over. I am supposed to remember I am not there anymore. I am supposed to look around: the print of Van Gogh’s Patch of Grass that you gave me, next to the window through which the blue of sky, the tangle of a thin mesquite, its leaves dropped in the winter. In the pictures when Notre Dame burned people stood on bridges over the Seine to watch the fire, where we stood, in the rain that summer, while the river rose, swelling, almost into waves. Now we hear, there is a demand for stonecutters to make new gargoyles, replacing those that fell and broke. When I lift myself from that frozen image, and see the living grass on the wall, the dark lines, the yellow, pink, white puff of a dandelion, maybe in the breaking their spirits were released, the gargoyles, over the water, over the city that Van Gogh said had beautiful light but was a hard place to live. So much suffering dissolving in the sky, like smoke. |
Margaree Little is the author of REST (Four Way Books, 2018), winner of the 2018 Balcones Poetry Prize and the 2019 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Her poems, translations, and criticism have appeared widely, including in American Poetry Review, KROnline, New England Review, and The Brooklyn Rail. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Kenyon Review, among others; her manuscript in progress, THE INTERIOR CASTLE, has been supported by the Arizona Commission on the Arts. She lives in Tucson and teaches at the University of Arizona.
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