Searching for Assisi

The yellow of the aconite pops into bloom
adorning the plots in the dirt like a shrine
to the St. Francis statue stolen, by the 

Anglo-Catholic girl on floor three.

When spring dropped in like a silent fog, like that

big chemical cloud from White Noise that 

no one ever talks about (but everyone talks about, not just

uptight intellectuals with big fat degrees that

shattered their ability to say 

“I love you” without intellectualizing it—

But nineteen-year-old check-out-girls who scan produce

at Tops and count down to their smoke break so they can

stand outside and light their Black and Milds and gaze up 

towards the sky to the mass of protons and think, 

“Someday, I won’t be able to smoke this anymore.”)

When that spring dropped in like a silencer at the end 

of a shot-gun and I knew that soon you would be gone,

I knelt down to that St. Francis statue and learned to 

pray by its marble edges, shedding bird seed like offerings 

to a saint I had never known and a God I had never heard of

before you.

They tell children that St. Francis was the environmentalist 

with the birds but to me, a child in every right but body

he was the Holy Man in borosilicate who lived in the garden

behind the chain-link fence and the Waste Management dumpsters.

He was the humble mage who played dumb on my behalf and 

lost his little, beakless fountain bird over and over and over 

to keep me from looking up towards the sky as the Dellilean smog 

that would soon drown our lungs and our minds grew nearer.

Until one day I jumped out of the car and he was gone.

And I looked at the sky and felt the inhale of centuries explode

like a kerosene bomb— and I expected to see something but

there was nothing at all. He was gone and so were you.

And I walked around like this for months, like a blind-folded dancer

searching for its partner.

And I saw nothing at all with clarity. Not the smile on 

my mother’s face, nor the deck of Italian playing cards on the 

dinner table nor a friendly exchange between two possible 

lovers.

All I could picture was the moment I put the car in park 

and stepped onto the industrial gravel and saw Francis’

footprints marked like origami prayer cards or Assyrian 

hieroglyphics pointing upwards to the sky.

And I cursed the girl on floor three with her 

Book of Common Prayer and her rosary beads because

I knew it was she that took him away and it was she that

left his imprint in the dirt and forced me to become subsumed

in this Orwellian cloud of soot and despair.

As the year passed I swore to hold steady in my 

admonition of this lay priestess who believed she could

will the structure of time by taking things as she pleased.

Until this morning when I walked out to the dumpsters and 

I saw that the yellow of the aconite had popped into bloom 

in the former arches of St. Francis’ silhouette. 

A sparrow came down to pick on some bird seed, a recipient

of last year’s devotions. And this little bird looked at me

and I to him, as if we were old friends that had lost our way

some time ago.

I couldn’t help but smile, as one cannot help but do 

when they see themselves come alive in another being. 

And when I looked back down he was gone. 

He had flown back into the sky.

I knew it, because I saw him there.

It was blue.