To a Christian



Episcopal, that church I visited at first
was awfully goddamn subtle, let me tell you,
all its miracles resigned to metaphor, its marvels made
off-white (on which the best suspended X
was intellectual, its wire imaginary and its matter gray;
it didn’t have a serif to its name, and no

man dying, either). I was more
attracted, therefore, to
the Catholic church, that good
stiff wallop of the bodily when you walk in,
a cool sepulchral stone, cold sweat. At least there seemed
some substance to the ideogram, some body to the love.
Red mud and wrap of mind, weren’t we
what happened after Mars and Venus mated?

All the alcoves harbored
statuary saints. In one, a well-fed mother
held a baby God, above a big blue world.
She sat there on a solid cloud, not quite
alone—mirabile dictu, a dog
of similar proportions there beyond the world
was carrying a torch at the tip of her foot, a foot
from North America. I put

a candle on the North Pole, which was up.
I lit one in Saint Rose’s alcove, too, because
you loved the zone of roses, loved
the swollen feeling, risen reds,
a kind of carnal fever that
undid you, rotting what
was rich. You loved

in point of fact two men:
one offered cool eternal life, the other
death, but with a kiss. So help me God,
as I’m alive, I can’t tell which is which.

     --Heather McHugh, Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993

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