‘Young Catherine’s Vision’ and Other Poetry by Mary Jane Myers

.

Young Catherine’s Vision

—on St. Catherine of Siena Invested with
the Dominican Habit by Giovanni di Paola

A maiden kneels on gray da Torre stone.
Save for a crucifix, the room is bare.
Her thighs seem formed of otherworldly bone;
her anorexic body drifts on air.
As if in answer to her fervent prayer,
three visitants materialize
from somewhere in the bright celestial skies.

Augustine, Dominic and Francis: each
extends to her his order’s vestment cloth.
A holy path is now within her reach.
From Dominic she takes a fabric swath,
avows to Christ her everlasting troth.
Not pledged to any convent’s cloistered schools,
she’s free to act outside of rigid rules.

A sainted figure, kindly yet austere.
She fed the poor, gave succor to the sick,
Siena streets, her modest early sphere.
Her reputation spread. Now in the thick
of church and state disputes, her bailiwick
was vestal holiness; untaught, she knew
how best to bring the quarrelers to Christ’s view.

She said: Inside your mind, construct a cell
from which your mind and soul can never flee.
Giovanni limns her mystic citadel.
His paintings soar to heaven’s apogee,
a gold-flecked craft enabling us to see
medieval scenes suffused with saving grace,
where God’s light permeates the commonplace.

.

.

Cross Country, 1964

Our family set out Westwood Ho! that summer,
from sleepy Naperville to California,
our Rambler station wagon overstuffed
with camping gear, suitcases, coolers, books.

Dad stopped to study each historic marker.
We three bored youngsters scrambled out to read,
puzzling over sundry random facts.
Buffalo roamed the plains, in countless millions;
pioneers died from fevers, froze in blizzards;
Lewis and Clark recorded unknown species;
American settlers warred with Indian tribes.

Somewhere in eastern Colorado’s desert,
Dad turned onto an unpaved country road.
Course gravel pelted, gritty sand kicked up,
scorching air shimmered, tumbleweeds cavorted,
dust funnels spun against the flat horizon,
beyond the ken of humans. Then we saw,
uncharted on our dog-eared Esso map:
a jagged row of desolate board shanties,
a small ramshackle store, encrusted windows
hung with sticky paper thick with bugs,
a Mobil pump, its fire-red Pegasus
bleached to anemic pink.

Dad braked the Rambler.
We all piled out except standoffish Mom.
She slumped in the front seat, her eyes shut tight,
fanning her face with a tatty Woman’s Day.
I stood beneath a drooping, brown-leafed tree,
flailing my arms to ward off buzzing horseflies.
Dad gestured vaguely toward the barren waste.

__See kids, this here’s the spot where I grew up,
__five miles out there, a windmill pumped our water
__out of a well. You had to keep an eye out,
__horses would trip and fall and break their legs
__from stepping into holes of prairie dogs.
__The bad old days, tell it to the Marines!
__We all got lost like birds in the wilderness.

Dumbstruck, I stared at him. My face scrunched up.
My cosy childish world was shattered. Dizzy,
I leaned against the tree to right myself,
clenching my lips, suppressing sobs of fear.
My younger siblings hadn’t listened. Whooping,
they crouched to hunt for Folsom arrowheads,
provoked a giant beetle with a stick.

__Let’s go, kids. This train’s now leaving the station!

That place must be the source of all my poems.

.

.

Mary Jane Myers resides in Springfield, Illinois. She is a retired JD/CPA tax specialist. Her debut short story collection Curious Affairs was published by Paul Dry Books in 2018.