“Saint Hyacinth Basilica,” by Patrycja Humienik

House of yelling, scent of hyacinth.
Back then, my head was full of fragments.
Of a question I buried & unburied
in the dirt. Flower brain unblinking.

Drenched in gossamer. Webs glint then
disappear. Subject fatigued by a silken un-
ribboning. Undoing takes more effort than
you’d think. Here, the subject was supposed to
be a child. Able to take a joke.

What makes a child serious could be called
devotion. It is beyond obedience.
Kneeling in recognition of one’s smallness
in the vast. I learned about love that way. But
when devotion is self-betrayal, what then?

          •

When devotion is self-betrayal,
the body knows. The first time I fainted,
I was a choirgirl. Someone caught me just
before I hit my head. Damn pillar. The saints &

clergy in the dome’s three-thousand-square-foot
mural looking down on me. Our Lady
of Częstochowa crowned in ten pounds of gold.
Jackowo, center of Polonia. Three
steeples visible from the Kennedy

expressway. Glazed terra-cotta, brick & stone.
Three pairs of heavy bronze doors I never
touched. Girl or woman, holy only
what’s done to me. I don’t agree. Still, that
story leaves a mark. I rarely touch myself.

          •

I rarely touch myself—the story leaves a mark.
The sword struck twice Our Lady’s face at Jasna
Góra, where the horses refused to go on.
Like millions, I kneeled at her shrine. One of

my uncles took me there en route to Warszawa,
fasting like his grandmother. Twice a week. If there
were photographs of her, they burned. My great-
grandmother hated artificial light. This
stubbornness enough to imagine we were

alike. Did she steal pleasure in the pasture
like her daughter’s daughter? My mother, swinging
onto cows’ backs with her brothers. Two decades
later, reunited, cheeks streaked with charcoal.
For a moment, terribly close to childhood.

          •

Each moment risks proximity to childhood.
Splayed out on the rocks, near the sprawl of lake,
that inland sea. It was spring, I think. We were
supposed to be in school. Driving for the sake

of going somewhere. Later, standing
at my friend’s kitchen sink, I don’t know
how long I stayed there, observing a tiny
jade on the windowsill, ache of the
weight of living in each oval leaf,

luminous though it was, easily engulfed,
I sensed, intensely, an older version of my
self. These selves. Embracing now. & Time,
beating heart, draping its diaphanous wings over
all of us, saying here we are here we are.

          •

Here we are, here we are, all of us
singing. Such was my dream of faith. Silver
hymn to slip on. No thirst. A river alongside
the whole way. I went to the desert instead,

praying for the pearl beyond the din of text
like a square jaw, clenched fist, asking to be
spared from analysis. To be abandoned
by dreaming. A woman acted upon.
But I move otherwise. That a daughter

carries the desire of many mothers before
is a hunch I visit in my sleep. Faces
forming a mass of land. Longitude. I long to
plant flowers there. Dry them upside down. Quiet
the house of yelling, stench of hyacinth.

This is drawn from “We Contain Landscapes.”