Canticle

(Inspired by a sermon given by Ailsa Guardiola González, First Christian Church, Tucson Arizona, c. 2018)

Eve

To hope despite a kiss as impermanent
as the last frost of spring—
the color green before a rainstorm,

the warp and weft of a greater choice
or a lesser journey.

A dream that malingers daybreak,
the moon rising likewise, to the last time
we ever make love.

Hagar

Dissonance in shades of blue and brown
as spectral as the distance
between a globe’s poles—

the spout of a final flask of water
from lips it can’t refuse.
A single gallon bladder

and hope as bare as the boulder
under whose shadow her son
was lucky to collapse,

a mere shift in breeze
the only promise of new life
under unexpected thunderheads.

Mary

Who is hemmed in square brick
as though sloughed of a robe
cut from the sky at midday.

Told in layers of quotation
a palimpsest from pictograph to abjad—
a canticle of wing and fin

and featherless claw,
yet a stag’s head mounted a month
before the first bugle of rut.

To be ploughed, once more, like a field.

Tideless acreage, then a tawny trail
a lisp of pollen, the last hope
of a crocus too early for the bees.

10/30/2023
for Jenn Stones

Carlos Valentin III is a member of Pima Meeting in Tucson, Arizona (IMYM).