A  

Virgin  

in  

Mexico  

City

for Jennifer Clement and Victor Manuel Mendiola

As I walked out that morning from the Hotel La Casona
I was thinking, or I think that I remember I was thinking,
that the world is its own poem
and needs no writing into existence
by you, let’s say, or me. I walked
a block or so along Durgano
thinking how little use the city had
for  

any  

reflections  

of  

mine  

on  

its  

wealth,  

reflections  

on  

its  

poverty,
so desperately, equally apparent,
how very little use the city had
for poems written by a visitor,
and  

one  

so  

briefly  

there.

                                                  I found

myself, let’s say, at a rotonda.
From it, six avenues radiated. For a while
I stood by a gas station in the triangle formed by two of the roads.
Notices by the pumps read Apague el motor.
Men  

in  

green  

overalls  

were  

filling  

up.
At  

the  

tapering  

point  

of  

the  

wedge,  

close  

to  

the  

traffic,
a  

shrine  

the  

size  

of  

an  

infant’s  

coffin,  

painted  

white,
with two tall cypresses before it, and red roses,
was enclosed in a low box hedge.
High above was a sign reading PEMEX,
advertising Premium and Magna grades of gas.
Inside the shrine, in a padlocked glass case,
an  

unprepossessing  

plaster  

Virgin  

stood  

behind  

a  

vase  

of  

lilies,
in glory.

                           If
you say the scene was unremarkable
I shall be tempted to agree, and I shall disagree,

for I was thinking then, and I think now,
of humble domestic altars with candles, joss and blossoms
lodged on the walls of Bangkok blocks
between  

the  

air-con  

and  

the  

fire  

escape,
and I was thinking of wayside shrines in Europe,
a  

statue  

of  

the  

Virgin  

carried  

home  

from  

Lourdes
on the back of a pilgrim who built a chapel for her,
a panorama of Jerusalem
painted for the fourteenth station of a Calvary,
and I thought then, and I think now, although I can’t say what the
thinking means,
that the universal spirit lives in glory, and is great, and will be known.

 

page129image384

In Sant’ Antonio di Padua

Christ winked at me as I was on my way
to Sant’ Antonio di Padua,
surprising  

me  

with  

an  

affable,  

almost  

roguish  

camaraderie  

–
winked from a hologram postcard that showed him

closing his eyes as he gave up the ghost
then opening now this one, now the other,
or even both at once, depending where I stood,
as if to say he was only fooling and wasn’t really dead.

That  

week  

a  

Pope  

had  

gone  

to  

the  

Happy  

Vatican  

in  

the  

sky.
The basilica was a stir of pilgrims and tour guides, a bustle
of grieving and prayer.
Stewards were making a clatter, setting out wooden collapsible chairs
for the swollen congregation they expected at a vigil.

Among the school of supplicants that shoaled about the shrine
I watched a woman, thirty-something, business suit and pearls,
pressing  

a  

sheaf  

of  

paperwork  

against  

the  

reliquary  

–
she lip-served in silence as if she were giving a blow-job to a lizard.

The  

Catholic  

church!  

–  

I’ve  

always  

had  

a  

soft  

spot  

for  

its  

comedy,
its hotchpotch of the silly, the rotten, the true, the outlandish,
the  

downright  

horrific.
All of the kitsch! The bones behind glass! The everlasting chapels
papered  

with  

testimonials  

to  

the  

Virgin’s  

intercession.

The  

first  

time  

ever  

I  

told  

a  

lie  

was  

in  

the  

confessional.
The  

first  

woman  

ever  

I  

fell  

in  

love  

with,  

ever  

desired,  

was  

a  

nun.
The  

first  

man  

ever  

whose  

brutal  

ways  

I  

detested  

was  

a  

priest,
an Irishman with a hacksaw voice and a harsh, abrasive smile.

How I thrilled to the ritual hiss of “those that trespass against us”,
sibilants pissing through Mass like the Trinity at the Eternal Urinal.
How I rejoiced at the thought of piecing the whole of the scattered
man together
when  

I  

saw,  

in  

the  

Hof burg  

at  

Vienna,  

one  

of  

John  

the  

Baptist’s  

teeth.

A Jesuit lent me And Then There Were None
which  

I  

finished  

in  

terror  

at  

four  

a.m.  

in  

a  

room  

in  

a  

German  

pension.
Another  

Jesuit,  

when  

I  

was  

fifteen,  

wanted  

me  

to  

go  

to  

his  

place.
Another, Canadian-Irish, taught me the Gaelic for pullet shit.

The church was a giver and taker, a helper and harmer, a friend and foe.
It taught . . . not love, which had purer sources, but love-despite-
the-evidence.
I learned to love not only the man on the cross, the supplicant woman,
the vendors of cards,
not only the canny cardinals elsewhere, affecting to be above ambition,

but the whole of the terrible comedy in Altichiero’s Crucifixion here,
where a man who has simply done a job of work has turned to walk away,
making his way through the crowd, his thoughts on other things already,
the hammer with which he drove in the nails tucked carelessly into
his belt.

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