This poem is called "Maculate."
It's got some interruptive language most of which
comes from the Gospel of Luke.
On the page, it's-- you can see because they're in parentheses
and italics.
Maculate just means the opposite of immaculate.
It means-- it can mean contaminated or dirtied,
but its basic meaning is just spotted.
The poem is in three sections.
"1.
I remember going door to door.
It must have been 1936, and half the town was out of work.
We always had the Red Cross drive in March.
Consider the lilies, how they grow.
The snow melt frozen hard again, and cinders on the shoveled
walks.
I was wearing a grandmother's boots.
Consider the ravens, they have neither storehouse nor barn.
The grocer gave a nickel.
I can see him yet.
Some people had nothing at all.
And I came to Mrs. Exner's house,
no thief approaches neither moth.
The woman was so bent with arthritis nearly whooped
when she walked up the street with her bucket and mop.
Not Solomon in all his glory.
The people she cleaned for wouldn't keep a bucket
in the house, no more.
She gave me three new dollar bills.
I'll never forget it.
I wanted the Earth to swallow me up.
2.
Oil cloth on the kitchen table, linoleum under his chair,
and both of them, and ugly hieroglyphic of yellow scorch
marks ringed with black.
My father must be tired to let the ash between his fingers
and the still lit buttons of his days
befoul the world around him so, bone tired.
And all but hammered to his knees with drink.
Burnt offering, I have not required.
The morning after the night he died,
the Undertaker's tail lights on the snow packed drive.
My mother sat just there.
Burnt offering I will not have, and he said, but only love.
I'm going to get a new kitchen floor.
3.
The raven is not an unmixed consolation.
What is manna to the raven leaves a crust
of blood above its beak.
A treasure which no moth corrupts.
The freckled Lily festers, the unspotted Lily
drops its trembling stamen in a smear of gold laid up for thee,
and still it is no little thing to think
we shall be eaten clean.