THE HUNGER OF SAINTS

I stop in the park by a fenced-in statue of some Polish saint,
while nearby, a prowl-car sweeps the hedges with its low headlights,
searching out miscreants. From a block of plain grey marble
the saint's head rises up against a blue night sky swollen
with the city's incandescence, and he looks out into it
like a teacher expecting nothing more, nothing less
from an unruly classroom. At his feet, the old women
of the neighborhood have placed a procession
of store-bought candles which pucker and gleam
with the wind, and other, stranger offerings:
a plastic deli container full of pickled red cabbage.
Strange to leave at this altar some semblance of hunger
that has long since left him, given in a mute attempt
at conversation. The old women with their nameless
ointments and swollen ankles wrapped in ace bandages
and their long yellow corridors swathed in the sticky
grit of ammonia, the faulty fluorescents ticking overhead.
I try to look back to the first secrets of their long-given thighs,
of boardwalks and dance halls and the dim confessionals
that came afterward, of their steady eyes as they calmly blanched
a young son's wounds, wringing out the blood
from the washcloth into a dirty bucket.
How completely they have surrendered themselves to the future,
to stop the bleeding and heal the wounds, so that this one
may beget and beget, all the while laying
candles and red cabbage at the feet of the dead.
I ask for the songs their saints have never sung.
I ask for the way these women sleep at night,
heavy, stolid, broken but firm.
I ask for the flare they put to the sputtering wick,
for their careful grasp of the uncertain.
I ask for one small name to say against the dark
besides my own.