Mary’s gaze

Don’t look up, Christ’s concave golden gaze
unbearable, wholly
beyond, beyond
holy: taste
the gold scent and kiss
the icon laid open, one wing of a book, with
its following eyes and
closed eyelid-like mouth’s
superimposed prints
of lips (as one white rose is
manifested in others, too
infinitely petaled)—this mouth
hiving unnumbered
kisses
of the by now long long dead . . .
I’ve come back to the church
of my mother, of
my own deceased six-year-old
self and his father
as usual absent, and
I look straight ahead and slowly walk
into Mary’s all enfolding
labyrinth-unraveled blue
and white child’s-drawn-
stars-haloed
gaze
made of birds’ sleep
and word-light
and find
without seeking, by
smell and touch only,
HER—
she is home, waiting
visible,
here.

—Franz Wright, third part of “Triptych,” titled “St. Paul’s Greek Orthodox Church: Minneapolis, 1959,” in Wheeling Motel (Knopf, 2009), 26-27