Hand Reliquary, Ave Maria Lane

Hand Reliquary, Ave Maria Lane

Hand Reliquary, Ave Maria Lane

God knows that there is no proof
that part returns to wholeness
simply because miracles happen
at a single church-going.

Her verdant branches labelled
with the names of the five senses,
the garden not ours, she prayed
for her illness to last beyond the grave,

and be the unsealer of that tree.
She might have been dead for a week,
though she went on with her deep
dying, her womb a transparent crystal

turning into a brown relic
even before her death. The blinding
beauty of her hood opening
acted upon me as my own ghost

would do, sounding silk,
as with a lifting gesture
she tore off flesh from her hand,
driving wide her middle finger

into the palm of the other.
Till being a vessel, Christ appeared to her
as a dish filled with carved-up bread
so unnaturally sweet, so lightly crushed,

she could quench the tall language
of his image in her mouth,
which was the breast-wound, always on the point
of being taken, in his female side.