Christina
The Leven van Sinte Christina de Wonderbare, a Middle Dutch text of the fifteenth century, records that the young girl from Limburg achieved transcendence by lying in ovens which had been heated for bread-baking.
Beyond the reach of the millwheel
my father the miller keeps starlings in cages
eyeball to eyeball they beat upward:
they float themselves off. Their pipe
is alchemical. Their quills snap in the downflap
for the starred grain falling through
the barred air, the bared cord
of the underwing whips the sun in a fierce breathing.
Thin-faced and egg-speckled
I am dry, I am shadowless. I wear
a moonwhite dress that scratches its arc
to the ankle. My arms rattle, stiff pistils
in the throats of the sleeves; downwinging
the wimple broods over my head, beating
out like the planed body of a bird.
It has its own orbit.
My sister cups tomatoes in her body
spheres converge in her moving, the paths
of a world red-tongued and seeded. Her hands
have a double skin of flesh and batter. At the mouth
of the oven the dark loaf of her head stoops
and raises its middle-cleft. In the glare
of her body I am bloodless, undividing:
I rattle like a gourd.
One midnight I creep into the oven.
As the shadow of the grain leaps up at me
the heat cracks an opening. I feel it entering:
the smooth circling of the germ, the seminal
turn of the private core in a slow stirring
rounding out the yolk into unskinned life,
the inner eye heavy with waiting.
A husk falls away from me.
My legs twist in tendrils: they crisp
to a blackness. I am still incomplete, now
I will be complete in the paring, the new-jointed
secret constructions. The plumes of the flames
flap centripetal; behind the bars of the grate
I fold in on myself in the eye of the red
panel beyond which channel the rattling hands,
the terrified voices. I am fleshing a horror.
Bloodbirth cannot be worse than this
cradled down in the coals where the ash flies
fanned from the lopped limbs. The ringed neck
unwraps itself from the splayed shoulders
of the gleaming spine, an uncurving flightspan
thin-downed already foreshadowing
the first swoop still folded
over the sparse tail, the sudden claw.
Can one life, one becoming hurt like this?
The hinges of the oven door cry and whistle, sunned burns
circle me, plotting their fireways in haloes:
this wing will dismember me
as it unstrings itself, shooting out
over the millwheel, the crammed cage with a shriek
like a child laughing. There is no minute
but this re-making, this parted belly, this startled flight.
The first furnace of dawn roars its new
opening: in each cycle there will be
this fire, the slow burn of monthly re-memberment
patterning the potential breathing, the
outline of the soft quill moulding
and unmoulding. This is the anti-death: in each
eye there is a feather unfolding. In each
re-vision flies the wing of breath.
Page(s) 24-27
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