canon

we live where we grow wine and honey. our mothers collect porcelain saints and, to pass days between seasons, we sit cross-legged on the kitchen floor and make alphabet saints spell the dirty words we know: seraphim of sarov (beat with his own axe), elpis (holy virgin), xanthippe (saved by jesus as a beautiful youth). sometimes we roll the small saints in our palms and spill them out to divine the name of our future husband, the father who will bring us dull, fat children. our mothers tipped honey into our milk and so we are all of us rolling and round like our mothers and our mothers' mothers and our mothers' mothers' mothers. as children of vineyards, we will never be more than our terroir allows. as children of honeycomb, we know we are all that is holy. a counting: the bible counts honey sixty-one times. john the baptist survived on honey and locusts. samson found swarming bees and their pride buzzing in the belly of a lion. when the honey makes us sick our mothers call upon saint ambrose, the patron saint of bees, of honeyed tongues. a bad batch, tainted with rhododendrons or mountain laurel, a bad batch makes us sweat and weaken; a bad batch makes our hearts skip beats. tainted with tutu bush, the honey makes us giddy, then convulsive. our mothers pray to ambrose, mouths languid with sweets and hands ticking rosaries. wine also makes us ill as it mixes in our blood. if we close our eyes and try hard enough we can feel christ form inside us; we can hear two heartbeats, each a half count off. communion dyes our mouths purple and we pretend we are our fathers, gulping after sunday study from invisible jugs. when christ grows too strong in our fathers our mothers pray to never-martyred saint martin, the saint of vintners and beggars and change: our mothers know there is no patron saint of bruised fruit. if i were a girl not in god i would wish to see past what i can. to wander the breadth of our lands, to see the vines as pregnant with grapes are the hives are with sound, makes my knees sore and my thighs ache from the climb. to fully explore is impossible and so we have given up and instead spend our time memorizing verse and putting things inside of each other. i confess: sometimes i wish to be simon, to see our stretch of wine and honey from above. sometimes i think i would break my knees and accept the stones: to fall from the air is to have flown. tarasios, hallvard, ides, simplicius
ignatius loyola, sabbas the goth
abanoub, linus, luke the evangelist
timothy, hildegard, abundius, teath
wilfrid of ripon, ephrem the syrian
willibrord, innocent, lazarus, luke
eligius, veronica, emmeram, romuald
brendan the navigator, eucherius of lyon.