for all saints' day

The Saints

a poem by: Michael Harris (Canada)
-from JACKET a zine October 2007


We have confined them to small rooms
and narrow beds. They have to live in silence, but with
mice breeding hourly in their walls. Though our furnaces
steam fullbore through the night, we keep

the rooms of saints very cold.
For solace, they look through the cellar keyhole
at the lost souls roaring at the light
which plasters them helplessly to the ceiling.

Their beds are also much too short.
Their legs are numb to the ankles,
and cold to the knees: they hang bulbuous
off the bed between severe iron railings,

paling in the cold like winter squash
hung over the parkinglot fence
in the last farmer's market of the year,
For their despair, the saints endure hopelessly

thin electric heaters popping their vertebrae
on the long rack of winter. For comfort, they listen
to the ineffable voices of water ascending, then
descending screaming into the dark gargel of pipes.

When the cold's at their thighs,
they no longer reproduce. Soon, they can't eat.
Their hearts, like those of jilted lovers, begin by degrees
slowly to cool, as when the first flush of lava

enters finally the open body of the sea.
Their eyes take on the granite look
common to all the saints. Even the hair becomes numb.
But they are different than we are:

we thought they were dead, but they were sleeping
only sleeping. When they wake, they tell us
what they saw in their fevers. We see mostly how
all the extremities wiggle, and return to pink.