“the Lourdes of America”
you look for a back-channel negotiation,
but no plea is offered only the pretense
you would accept a lesser sentence, time
served, you keep at this in your head as if
saying a rosary, think maybe a novena,
or a pilgrimage, yes, that would be worth
the effort, so you find yourself in the foot
hills of the sangre de cristos, on your knees
in the soft ochre dirt of chimayó said to be
healing, a terra bendita down in a small pit
in a room beside the santuario, you bend
over, peer into the future, cool and damp,
you grab the flour scoop on a small chain,
and start to dig, first with your hands, then
sift it into a small plastic cup to bring home,
maybe help you both with what is coming,
or if you are lucky will pass you by, again
as you kneel you can’t help but think that
as a grave, this would be better than most
and when you leave you see the ex-votos,
crutches, half-limbs, hundreds of photos,
taped to the wall, so many marines among
them, the high collar of the dress blues,
and though you know better, you say i hope
they are ok, that these are the recovered,
but this visit came around my wife’s diagnosis,
the vast kingdom of the dead was new to me,
what do i do now with this dirt, tell me where
do i rub it on, how do i keep it, and as this is
a siege against her brain, then will it help me
live two lives, hers and mine, help me add
what I can as it takes what it can from her,
these the meander of thought at four a.m.,
in that dim light I see fate or a god has slipped
into our bedroom, i see in half-dream it looks
like a diplomat dispatched from a powerful state,
one that takes what it wants because it can,
a smooth envoy, hand over his lips, whispering
to an aide something amusing about miracles
Fred Marchant is the author of five books of poetry, the most recent of which is Said Not Said (Graywolf Press). Marchant is also the editor of Another World Instead (Graywolf), a selection of early poems by William Stafford. He is co-editor with Jennifer Barber and Jessica Greenbaum of Tree Lines (Grayson Press), an anthology of contemporary American poems focused on trees and forests. His poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies, including the Braving the Body (Small Harbor Publishing)), poems about illness and resilience. A co-translator (with Nguyen Ba Chung) of several contemporary Vietnamese poets, Marchant lives in Arlington, MA.
