how he began to overcome himself by going out for alms.
He praised God throughout the piazzas.
What were they all waiting for, a written invitation?
One had been issued centuries ago!
Or would they all wait for death
to rise up and be counted?
Gathering the alms of the night, in heavy stones,
Francis carried his future, his past:
wet blisters, a stinging chorus.
Many saw him as a Pharisee
calling others the same—what was so new in the gospel
that it had to be yelled across the squares?
But others knew better: felt their collusion
in his cracking bones—they who’d hung back
in every meadow, spilling heaven like wine
under stars, on cold earth.
His father and half-brother came, but
like puppets this time: where they lived, in ridiculous words
they could never speak.
One night he skirted his friends’ gambling
debt, balked—at his cowardice.
Then he forced himself, rushed to his knees, sharp dice,
begging for the men’s (abashed) forgiveness.
And rejecting a saving face, he stayed there
for too long a time, flushing in the stupidity
that was still saving his life.
I
The first consideration of the holy stigmata
(The mountain is offered)
In the forty-third year of his Lord, this little man,
bread for the birds, set off,
(like us, but without our sense of direction).
Oblivious, he joined the green-throated chorus,
petal and pistil, him so sunk in his robe
that you had to go through the smiles to find him.
Earth was a place to be swept, cleaned: broom of dirt
on a sea of dirt, dirt on dirt dancing.
He wanted to be a dandelion spore, tiny
piked pinwheel, silk with a snag, under the great wooden
cart-like wheel of the stars.
Orlando de Chiuse, though, needed his heart-rings numbered,
the years having pushed his best years away.
He saw and detested it, this told joke,
this self, house of cards, shill under money’s glass.
He knew his road too well:
a topography of Lent, the burden of the strong—
a collection plate feeding too many hands.
“So great is the good I hope for, all pain delights me . . .”
(This was a different time I should tell you.
People listened. And each, in his own hearing,
received the measure of his pain: small, like the wound
at Jesus’ side, stretch and serous fluid,
His labored breathing: the catch there in his ribs—steps,
like an uneven playing field, each of your friends,
one by one, leaving; just you in snake-skin boots,
off the Trailways at the edge of this no-town—
the abandoned gas station, ancient, rusty, shell-white pumps,
the hot crackle of tall, dry grass, sting of grasshoppers
as you walk through a field, duffle bag in hand.
And finally, as you expected, the distant
gathering of skyline, dark, across the southern
Colorado plain: the throat of God.)
Orlando wanted out of himself, whatever that was,
away from the easy laughter of friends.
Yes, “most willingly,” Francis would speak to him.
“But first honor thy friends who have invited thee to feast.”
(All things in time, at time’s pace,
so that time and earth might be valued.)
And then the gift—a mountain: shaven heads,
measuring prayer, two of the wiser friars
on the periphery, where the only voice they heard
was God’s: in green leaf, the drinking of water
against sunny banks, refracted feet—how it thirsted one,
for the Spirit and for how he meant things;
while the soldiers: in issued boots, the company swill
that grumbled long before rations.
Everyone there beginning in that place everyone does,
out of the place he had settled on: the glamourless gospel,
accomplished through repetition, the showing up:
the time beneath time were time noun enough—
grace and movement, and it’s the effort that stays,
the long and quiet patience of God.
Eventually, Masseo de Marignano, Angelo Tancredi,
and Leo, the slow, go with him: James, Peter,
