When Saint Francis materialized
in the corner of my studio apartment,
I figured I was in for a quick

message from the Almighty—Thou
shalt lose weight, or Thou shalt not lie
with thine physics professor. I thought

that it would take an hour—two hours
tops. On the first day, he didn't speak,
but held a steady rhythm of five sighs

per minute. On the second day, he moved,
began undoing his robe, and I
imagined red squirrels perched upon

high snag ribs, and swallows—mouthy
little things—skimming the fields
of fabric around his ankles. In him,

I expected to find where the river
quirks, to learn how many feet
a millipede can live without. I

wanted to see my prayers tangled
in his chest hairs. Or maybe I
wanted no hair—for his body to be

bare as tonsured scalp, but now it's day
thirty and his hands are still unfolding
layers upon layers of brown wool.

Sometimes, I look past him to watch
infomercials, where hollow-cheeked
women shove apples into self-

cleaning juicers. I invite men over,
but they spend the night asking
questions he won't answer, like why

leaves in shadow appear light blue,
why bees prefer beer cans to daisies,
or why their wives don't forgive them

when they come home smelling of me?
I often dream of him speaking, of his
final unravel revealing a silk dress.

A present from my father, he says,
and as he raises his thumb to touch
my forehead I ask, Which father?
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Detail from A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie, by Albert Bierstadt
"The Shape of a Mind Thinking"

"In Wordsworth’s notebooks, the scattered lines read as if gobbets of music and language are pushing out through his pen on to the surface of the visible world. The atmosphere is of retrieval, of quite literally the re-collection of ideas and associations, the memory of sights and sounds he had gathered when out in the woods and on the high tops of the Quantocks."

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What Sparks Poetry:
Jenny Browne on Jane Mead’s “The Lord and The General Din of the World”

"Can a description of an empty bottle of blue cheese dressing change your life? I wouldn’t have wagered it, but I never forgot that “steady grating” and how Mead’s poem pointed the way forward. Because I didn’t know you could put stuff like that in a poem, by which I mean the stuff my actual life felt made of, let alone hold it right next to God, whoever she was. I had thought being a poet meant I had to learn to write (and see) like Rilke, but now I thought maybe I might try to be (and listen) like Jane Mead."
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