After Hildegard of Bingen
We fill our eyes when they are closed. We dig our fingers into the crevices of the flamed grain of the oak table in search of crumbs and pebbles of sand nested there. We hear the songs that come from these nests, clear and crisp as Ordo Virtutum, a music for the open mouths of Medieval women.
1st Class
We still struggle with our woman-soul. We will fill our empty arms. We will fill our empty bellies and our empty mouths. Ordo Virtutum will fill our empty ears. Our ears are always empty. We will never listen. We do not listen. We are women; we do not listen.
2nd Class
We empty our eyes when they are open. We will watch a ring and a ring weighed and bound. We will take and give these rings. We want the flint and fossil of the voice, but we know the voice is clear and crisp. The voice echoes like a rocking cathedral. The voice echoes like Amiens and Chartres.
3rd Class
We want a house as large as a cathedral. We want a house as dark and cold as a cathedral. We want a house as empty as a cathedral. We will fill our mouths when they are empty.
Supreme Class
We will fill our mouths with him and him and him. We will fill our mouths with the Father and the Son. We will taste the sharpness of the slaughter.
Didi Jackson’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Green Mountain Review, The Common, Café Review, Passages North, and Sierra Nevada Review, among other publications. Her manuscript Almost Animal was a finalist for the 2015 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize offered by Persea Books and a semifinalist for the 2015 Orison Poetry Prize. Her chapbook Slag and Fortune was published by Floating Wolf Quarterly in 2013. She divides her time between Florida and Vermont, teaching humanities at the University of Central Florida and poetry and the visual arts at the University of Vermont.
