Catherine Sasanov poems

Torcello

Offshore, the Apocalypse
stays contained
to one island and its church.

Venice's ruler's out wedding
himself to the ocean

while I'm ankle deep
in the Adriatic,
eyes raised to a book

unencumbered by words: A Bible
that reads from East to West. Guidebooks
want only

to see it as ceiling—the Basilica
San Marco,

where Christ's hands open on wounds
embedded with rubies, and priests

hold back the sea with brooms.
I'm taking on incense,

bowing at altars dragged out
of Constantinople,
sloshing across marble
sacked from Jerusalem.

Offshore, the sea's a bride bought
with a fist full of diamonds
the Doge throws into the deep—

a sign of his true and perpetual dominion.

Then why does walking into this church
mean stepping into the ocean?
The sea is a dog—
Priests throw in bones just to placate it.

The year's nearly 2000,
but the millennium already hit once

on the island Torcello,
a kind of plague the Venetians contained.
999 years,

and the dead still crawl from dirt
towards their radiant bodies,
they still gather up

missing limbs: arms, legs, hands
sharks and beasts keep regurgitating.

We do what we know—
But Christ never wanted to manage
resurrections in Venice.

Underdressed in the flesh
from dead civilizations,
he moves among us in Byzantine skin.

I'm getting close to this God
worshiped only by tourists.

He picks at the wounds
on his crucified body, the injury
scabbed over with jewels.


Statue of a Soul in Purgatory: Iglesia Santa Teresa la Antigua, Mexico City

Look how I died
just so someone could drag in
a hunk of wood
and hack me out of it.
I’m fuel
feeding my own torment,

up to my waist in carved fire
gone cold after hundreds of years.
Fire covered in dust,
throwing no light in the dark.

Flames shoot up around me—
my own picket fence
faded
and splintering. The difference
between you and myself

is lawn that separates
you from that fence
while you stand in your backyard
looking for God. You’re waiting

for the thin layer of paint
men scraped off this ceiling: God falling
in pieces into my outstretched arms.
Friend, come close

and caress this grief.
Dig its splinters of flame
out of your hands.


Cratícula (El Convento de Santa Teresa la Nueva, Mexico City, 1693)

Its architecture
works each woman down
till she’s nothing but hunger: hole in the wall

where her mouth will be.
One word on her lips.
One word wooing Christ into her body—

God doled out in pieces on her tongue.

Cratícula
passes for window
in this windowless room. Look what thrives

in the dark:
St. Theresa supporting
the terrible tree growing out of her chest—

Each branch bearing Carmelites.

The roots
feeding on her heart.
What you see is a body: useful

only as dirt.
A tree painted on a wall
so no one can hang herself from it—

so no one climbs down from its branches.

Dead to the world,
each nun craving God
waits in this room to be fed. One clutches

a knife in her fist:
Esclavo de Cristo carved
into her chest — Each woman

so docile, a priest feeds her by hand.