print previewColloquy with St. Mary of Egypt
Her historicity remains uncertain. A sixth-century vita identifies her as a Judean singer.
A half-century later she is a nun with no name. The following narrative, based on Sophronios
(ca. 560–638), finds her as a prostitute who, struck by a holy vision, abandons Jerusalem
for the desert. Forty-six years later she tells her story to Zosimas, a passing monk.
1
The oldest of the Old World roils—
that desert, dear,
of your redemption. Do cheers, tear gas, or wails
move you, sleepless still, through
streets you once abandoned? In bookstacks, yes,
we met unmoored from our centuries.
A man whom I made speak had made you speak
till we three fled that tattered crime scene.
And now in frescoed Lent, in hagiographic glass
2
I seek you: unfed & thinly androgynous—
a cloak to ward off cold
and loathsome nakedness, your handreceding, silvery as our moonlit surf—
or so the Byzantines once painted.
Does your halo hail me or receive true believers?
However its gold foil glows, know
this: that grandeur’s only possible with pressure.
Sainthood encircles you. The stoplight shifts to yellow.
3
And people—stacked daylong upon other people—intersperse
prematurely. It is evening, mid-November,
MUNI crowds
merge and mull, spilling out from sidewalks.
And there’s steam and glances
held two beats too long and the taqueria’s lime-sweet ventilation.
Though we live out dense, almost-island lives
appetite still narrows the space between us.I walk
into this rush-hour crushand wait for it
4
to move me. I long to lead you
through this throb and throng— past tram wires & the Transamerica spire,
past taillights crisscrossing
fog-locked hillsides. We’re flush with light not warmth
and take sex as winter’s savior.
Do you feel it—vaguely waiting, willfully bated—in these jostled bodies?
Fucking here holds such small,semantic thrall; clothing
whispers free in the mind’s undressing.This Mission, this city
5
saintly named, teems with so many
I see as you,a girl—she glances back, she ambles on—
reminds me why neck tattoosare sexy:
we want our pictures whole; we must imagine herunshirted to do so.
Young still, loving a lovely wife
and son, I turn toward home, kiss your gilded hand, and think
this icon’s flatness
does not suit you.
6
Wilderness, a few trunks upthrust
and zero underbrush, no berries or thirst-quenching streams—
that is all I expected.
Penitent first, only later saint, I walk this dirt
I’m meant (with my three meager
loaves) to loveas one might a hereditary acreage.
And I too borrowed tongues to please or succumb.
What lover doesn’t knowlovers everywhere are actors?
7
Mary—I am a man transfixed by you
but fixed into (forgive this thought) his home’s small lot:
I picture winters thinner, whole years
lost like toys beneath couch pillows.
And yet this city’s bodies move
aware of their own bodies.I feel them, lithe in denim, a wind
with hips I’d press into or kill for. I feel them but must come home
to wife and son— lest your story
8
detain me. Those who’ve told it call you harlot, pray to a hermit—
forgetting how both roles hold
such freedom: I watch a woman’s hand ascend a thigh;
I stare into a window where someone reads past midnight.
I am only free
in the day’s in-betweens, eavesdropping on outdoor bars
or lifting into the livesuncurtained above them—
Mary, take my hand and deliver me into either, into ether.
9
How many voices, various timbres,
possessed me until (46 years gone) I barely owned my own?
With Zosimas I summoned everyone
I’d ever heard to muster my own story.Beside his muse, the monk could not move
Speech is merely heat
emanating from a body, strengthened by the pores that warm it—
the mouth is only its holiest exit.
I am weary here, upon your lips:your nearness exceeds your reverence.
10
So let me hover over yours—
hands cupped above a potter’s wheel—I’ll palm
your heat, or shape it. Fall’s here, bringing Dungeness crab and stone fruit.
The streetlamps must last a little longer.
And we, who shall lie mild, linger together
in restaurant corners
where the rich leave wine unfinished.I drink; you drink—
There must be more than words
11
between us. I’ve this story: once there was a man
who so loved an ancient tongue that he felt
a millenium of air collapse
in loam-rich pronunciations. He’d blush and brim
with a wantonness that could—when translated—consume him.
Once, snowbound in Louisville, he did nothing else.
For days he hoarded syllables
as one would the stars in heaven.
12
But now his house stirs
with its own small voice, sweet as a mockingbird’s—
its contours forged from listening. What joy to hear his words turned back
on him; what fear to know his discontent is mimicked.
A smart friend (OK, my therapist) advised: “To change the way
you see the world remember: your kid sees his whole worldthrough you.”
Teach me how to want less, or want me.
Give me your wilderness, or will me to refuse it.
13
I am altogether earth and ash and flesh,
Alexandrian by birth— a runaway who resorted to sorting flaxseed.
I asked for alms. I asked to be neither wife nor daughter.
Then, waking up one afternoon, I saw a lover leave me
coin, oblivious to that rarer gift
he’d offered: he listened.
September followed, the Exaltation of the Holy Cross,
and those pilgrims bathing by the seaside. My body—warm as the unraked sand—
14
bought me safe passage.
All toward Jerusalem the sea lurched—boat, man, and me
rocking unsteadily. My shamelessness was such I drank
the world up through their hungry bodies. Why did the sea
not swallow us whole, drown our unholy journey?
On land I found new hands, a mob which—
driven by love of one—offeredthe pleasure
of being pressed by many.
15
Is that dark, understated charge why you dawdle
now, one more domestic truant? Here’s where it led me:
Up till dawn, waiting for church gatesto swing free,
I was three times denied entry.
I held tight to the holiest I found;
I watched a groping couple going forward. Still, I sat there
still—anchored to that courtyard’s refuse.
It was then that She appeared and then the desert.
16
So meet me where the grass is cool and lovers—scarved
in darkness—hide their mischief.Here is Mission Dolores Park: dusklight, caressing.
Its namesake welcomes
worshippers one block north. Each group seeks
a voice that will embrace it.
Both buy love with secrets.
So let us drift through this potsmoked playground.
I am more real than the priest I met who only loves you for converting.
17
Lights aswirl around my head
and the refrain of lascivious songs—
my three loaves gone to stone, and errant weeds I’d suck the juice from:
these were my first 17 years. Here is the solitude (thirst
then lust compounding thirst) you swoon for.
One whole month I refused the sky, my tears
feeding the desert. At its close I lacked both food and clothes.
My name never felt so good as when I yelled it skyward.
18
And She (gentler now, Her voice faint as a fruit bat
gauging the distance to its dugout) gave reply—
and I would no longer want for meal,
embracing rock when shelter was unforthcoming.
I was happy then, unbidden;
my refusals rained down
from a beetle’s whirring wingtips.
I’ll call you love, my love, when you feed on the Word alone, as given.
19
Praise be then to thee who lives in sumptuous destitution.
Is this blasphemy? (So be it.) Tragedy (one poet said) is
imagination showing us lives we can’t access. But you
refuse it all; I wish heaven
was more than a handful of belabored words
meant preserve me. How would you, Mary, have me
proffer myself more? I’ll disengage (through penitence
or praise of you) from this erotic world, but you are all my fancy.
20
I walk to Mission and Cesar Chavez.
I stand beneath St. Luke’s—of her holiness, Sutter Health; of the angels
who cut a son from my love and the pediatric doc
who told us this story about honey:
Once upon a time three soldiers wandered through the desert.
One stumbled into a hole. It oozed with honey.
And then they dug to find the head, immaculate, that it surrounded.
And then they ate till morning. Dear Mary, I would dip—
21
—into the sweetness I’m embalmed in?
My boy (whose night-long psalm the dark
has, piecemeal, discharged, whose hunger—cold as an unstruck bell—
still rules him), you sweeten
me too, ummortify my appetites— or are at least persistent.
Put my name
upon your tongue. (It’s done.) Divest yourself of all that’s not
its sound (that honey, that sun) then repeat it till
22
She fills you— I will be there too, so much
freer, a mouth where you presupposed an entrance.
Or linger on this secret:
I’ve imagined—in Lent’s fifth Saturday, in a vita penned and passed and read again—the heaven
of unborn vocal chords,
a life’s desultory remnant (may one reader
retain us).You’re discontent with contentedness?
I’ve loved
23
Zosimas since he entered
the fantasy my desert cold had gilded. He squinted, light glinting
off gypsum. He stopped to watch me.
I tried to flee but rose
instead, buoyed about a wadi. How long did I hold there, unclothed,
before I took the cloak he offered?
Its fur (musk-infused) and threads (a monk’s bed) encircled me
but asked for nothing.It was that flesh, incarnate
24
of his first remarks (“Glory to God, who grants gifts to those who love Him”)
that saved me. Zosimas alone offered
his body as his voice’s vanguard.
Naturally I would, in loving him, reverse it.
He heard everything you’ve heard.
You owe your hearing it to his words, rivering down through others’ words,
each younger than the last one. I only asked
for a year’s silence (tell me why) before his first retelling.
25
Because I was indebted to Her who’d quarantined the world;
because Zosimas pledged a future communion;
because his eyes distilled
the sky
and I’d grown accustomed to watch where I was walking;
because I could lodge myself like a pebble
beneath his tongue
that he’d return to his monastery in secret.
26
And so you went unuttered.
Mary, this much this city’s taught me:
sex is the earth’s endless pull; it exerts
itself regardless of which bodies will or won’t receive you.
Likewise words, which don’t just preserve, but weigh—
their gravitas is part gravity, and names
build out their own exacting orbit. By the way,
you can call me Derek.
27
Love, allow me my last refusals.
I could remain Hers till heard as his. To undim my name
would mean one thing: Zosimas could not return it.
And so his cloak became the vellum
sheaves I couldn’t read
but knew that he passed through: I rubbed the hide that withstood the world.
I felt the flesh that felt his lungs’ upheavel.
Come: approach this page and breathe
28
till your lover fills your dormant senses—
that was my summer, fall, and winter.
Zosimas returned beneath a moon full as a silver coin, and I walked
upon the Jordan to greet him.
He brought figs & sweet legumes. A chalice
held the Lord’s blood, though it was that blood’s messenger I followed.
Desire, you say,
moves you now—but it is dissimilitude that will save you.
29
Would that I could hide in the love you hid
from Zosimas, or loft myself into altitudes that nuture solitude—
I’d move like a dandelion’s white thread
through flight patterns headed home; I’d drift through lovers sipping
sodas below their baggage. But no.
I can hold here half a night or more,
another figure in fog, just walking.
But no— better to wrestle compromise from two truths
30
and call it a conclusion.
“I love you,” the semiotician tells his love.
“I love you,” he repeats, but also means: “I need to hang up the phone.”
Is marriage not equally a metaphor— resigned to reconciling
contradictions?
I hold my mouth, Mary, beneath this stream, knowing
my baptism cannot catch you. I make of you a mask
only to find myself convinced by communion.
31
It is blood and it is wine.
And Zosimas—who alone beheld my full self—
returned home, blind to the sinner he’d resurrected.
Only then did the sand seem like a page untarnished. And I who couldn’t read
was writing: “Dear Father—
bury this body, a humble Mary, in red
desert’s morn. Here reborn, I will to dust this dust
return— For me Lord shall Zosimas pray. He’ll be here, a year’s time.
32
In the month of Pharmouthi (so say the Egyptians)
In the month of April (so say the Romans)
on the Passion’s last night
died I. My Last Supper, Zosimas gave—” and I gave him my flesh to bury.
This, my friend, was where my speech was meant to end: sand
warmed by sun, ants inside my letters’ grooves, darkly glowing.
But you had to escape on the lips
of your creation. We all wear masks, my love, to face our waking.
33
I’ve loaned you
a role, given you this night to find
the solitude you yearned for. So tread
lightly down these now uncrowded streets; follow the white figures
walking forward. Mine did not decay
until Zosimas found
my writing in the canyon. The desert was my preservative.
A lion helped him with the digging.
34
Our love then, forever ours:
whether darkness or disinterest splits us.
Today I read that Voyager had shook off our sun
and soared—interstellar orphan—on a course
its home star charted. Whatever children, whatever lovers,
bid us elsewhere, our signal lingers
blinking, blushing—
red as the pulse hidden beneath your sunburn.
35
I run my fingers along a building’s brickwork.
I feel the shoulders (cool in T-shirts, maybe strapless) on which the mortar pressed
its pattern. I feel the shirts unbutton—
and it is nothing.
I shall instead bear down—
bear you, Mary, down to basement stacks, and then bear home;
let whispers lead you down, let my paleness pass now
like a moon sailing beyond your window.
36
The street is bright with constellated smartphones—
and sparks of trolley wire, and foreclosed storefronts—and I am
led on now by what’s left of you, my Northstar
in shattered stained glass. I scatter you like the coins
that made music in my pocket.
And yet, and yet my jawbone aches
that you, unbeknownst to most (or soon to be),
might irrevocably kiss me.
37
Dear boy: don’t you see? We have touched and touched and touched
in the space between these lines— your lips are ever more
upon my lips: what is imitation
but a love ground so fine you breathe it in unknowing?
All my pores release themselves to ruin or rain.
You delight in me, dream me silky thoughtsyou’ll surrender to—
but when have you thought to have me?
Mine’s a body you would (like Zosimas) obscure but never enter.
38
I lay you down in the crowd boarding the 14L. Find an expression here
that suits you. Let these people lead you
home; let this city spin its nocturnal charm or turn
into a ball of foreign words— a gift
to offer your son and one your wife’s already given.
Listen now: her syllables (я тебя) are palletized air (люблю) and diaphragm,
tapwater (мой мальчик) and (мой сын) farmers’ market produce—
Your voices rise from bookmarks.
39
Mary of Egypt, Mistress Mary, Mary My Ascetic whose name is the lone weight
I carry from this evening: when it tolls, this charm I stole, for saviors,
singers, gardens—
let it toll always as thee. Behold: I take this bell of you
before you sail off unbodied.
I pass through Muni’s pneumatic doors, past sputtering cars, and see three men
asleep in St. Mary’s Park, off Crescent.
Return to your lion’s grave smoother than mortuary stone
40
as I return home, crack the door to hear—
in words she learned one by goddamn one; in a voice
other than the voice we love in— my wife sing our small son down.
And he is singing there beside her.
I sip her honeyed tea till a small hive hums inside me.
Rain forks against the window glass, and I fold
my old words into Zosimas and Talbot and Sophronios:
we are the shroud you shine through. 
| 1.6 | “A man whom I made speak”: Jacob Balde (1604–1668), an Alsatian Jesuit and Neo-Latin poet. Once, while serenading his lover from beneath her window, he overheard singing in a chapel next door. The next day, it’s said, he converted. |
| 6.1–8 | An interjection, however brief. Also a rebuttal. |
| 9.1–8 | She returns, but won’t begin her story in full until 13.1. |
| 11.7 | “Hoarded syllables”: Latin, with its quantitative prosody, lends itself to mouthy, self-satisfying utterance. Sophronios wrote in Greek. |
| 16.1–8 | The poet, progressing south, becomes insistent, interruptive. |
| 19–20 | The inkling of a dialogue. She will anticipate him in 21.1. |
| 19.1 | “sumptuous destitution”: Richard Wilbur’s phrase for Dickinson. |
| 19.2 | “Tragedy (one poet said)”: the poet is T.S. Eliot. |
| 20.1–4 | “of the angels / who cut a son”: The poet—out of self-pity, out of exhaustion—said the following as he put on his scrubs: “I feel like I’m headed into Chernobyl.” The obstetrician’s reply: “Uh uh, honey. You’ve already been through that. This here’s the easy part.” |
| 21.7 | “(It’s done)”: bolder, more welcome, he is able now to slip answers into her sentence. |
| 22.4 | “Lent’s fifth Saturday”: John Berryman, this poem’s silent patron, reminds us that the date can coincide with April 1 (“April Fool’s Day, or, St Mary of Egypt,” The Dream Songs 47). |
| 27.4 | “vellum”: calfskin treated for use in early manuscripts. The finest variety was uterine, pages made “from the skins of unborn or stillborn animals” (The Bookman’s Glossary). |
| 28.5–8 | Her coyness extends into the afterlife. Sophronios writes of them reciting the Lord’s prayer, and when “the prayer [had] come to an end, according to custom she gave the monk the kiss of love on his mouth” (trans. Maria Kouli). |
| 30.2–3 | “I need to hang up”: Barthes’s point here relates (unsurprisingly) to both semiotics and eros. The phone bit is courtesy of Ira Glass (This American Life, episode 514). |
| 33.6 | “until Zosimas found”: “He ran up to her and bathed the feet of the blessed woman with his tears, for he did not dare to touch any other part” (Sophronios). |
| 35.6 | “basement stacks”: a composite, by now, of Doane Library (Denison University), Rackham Graduate Library (University of Michigan–Ann Arbor), and Stanford’s Green. |
| 37–38 | Her final reassurance, lodged in the poem’s coda. The poet returns in full by 39.1. |
| 38.6–7 | “Я тебя люблю, мой мальчик, мой сын”: Russian, “I love you, my little boy, my son.” |
| 39.7 | “St. Mary’s Park, off Crescent”: conveniently, coincidentally, a three-block walk from his home in the neighborhood of Bernal Heights. |
| 40.7 | “Talbot and Sophronios”: see Holy Women of Byzantium: Ten Saints’ Lives in English Translation (1996), edited by Alice-Mary Talbot. Also of use: The Life of St. Mary of Egypt (1974), edited and translated by Mother Katherine and Mother Maria. |