Next poem is called "The Saint."
And the saint in this case is Francis of Assisi.
And I think I wrote the poem because I
have some love for the figure of Francis of Assisi.
And also in a sense, to desentimentalize what
has been, in history, a very sentimental saint.
I don't think there's anything else I have to say about it.
"The Saint."
In the heart of Umbria, Francis of Assisi was born.
His father owned a horse to take the family
through the countryside.
And when the boy saw a field mouse borne away
in a hawk's claws, he felt as hard
as the war extended over the gloomy highway
away from Florence to his grandmother's farm.
That night, this from his diary, he
watched the faces of his family in sleep,
and for the moment believed he was the only one alive.
He knelt and poured his body into his knees on the floor,
dreaming he came on a red cottage, down a hill,
toward a stream.
And his eyes fixed on a murder taking place inside,
the ritual of blood foaming out of a woman's side.
From this he sought a rational power too severe to satisfy.
So he grew and roamed with little love for priests
and the tired women who followed everywhere he walked.
He allowed their watchings of his ministration
to the animals.
He felt no nostalgia for the dead.
We see his mouth often painted flower-like, equivocal.
For like a mother of too many children,
his strength was a kind of disenchantment.
He had no faith.
Complex with age, as if the severity of youth
were preparation for a death.
He carried a lock of his grandmother's hair on walks.
Everywhere, he heard echoes of himself,
beating of too many tired hearts.
And all paths away from cities were fingers stripped of flesh.
He tried to pass those fingers into the walls of his skull.
But there was no escaping the huddled farmers who
brought their sorry cows.
Though it was said he never loved any woman,
he offered the lock of hair as a token of his need.
He always took it back.
He told one disciple he carried that memory
of his family in sleep, thinking them dead,
that the gray hair sprouting from the widow's peak
oppressed him by its passion.
At his death, the whole country undulated.
He was fate, a lack of emotion in the fingertips.
He became the easiest of saints to sentimentalize.
Perhaps he was the invention of the religious painters,
a gourd into which some country wine was poured.
We make from that wine some parables, not of ourselves,
but of what we wish to commemorate, moral in us all.
A kind of obligation or human invention
best left misunderstood.