The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Incidental Pollen by Ellen Austin-Li

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When the World Was Holy

               after Mary O’Connell

What I have to tell you is true.
There was a day I came home
from the hospital and sat alone
by the front window, perched
on the arm of Dad’s chair and stared—

                              each blade of grass breathed

                                             on the lawn, new green pulses,

                              while the air was a violet lung

                                             expanding and contracting—

                                                            every ray of the sun sang.

I tell you these things,
although they seem un-
believable. I scarcely believed myself, but the pull
of metal staples holding together
the skin on my abdomen, the ache
of core muscles still split
by surgical wound, grounded my body.

                              Some Spirit lifted me.

Memory
of this moment is all I can conjure,
as the knowing             slipped away
like some rare animal relegated to legend.

I was revisited in the unlikeliest place:
my bedroom, twenty-five years later, where
I tried to outpace this wild

                              thirst, the first drink that would melt into my tongue

                                             like the answer to a desert prayer,

                                                            though I knew the well was poison

                                                                           and would just as soon kill me.

                              I’d take the chance. Desperate. On the edge

                                             of trading my son, my family, for oblivion—

                                                            instead, I opened        a book

to a story written by a man from the 1930s

and saw myself on the page. The words

caught fire like some flame fed by oxygen,

                              wings beating, pouring pure blue grace

                                             until                    I stilled.

                              The god in the grass had returned.

A disease of the soul—that’s what
had been wrong with me all along.

I tried to shout the news to everyone
who’d grown weary of my darkness,
but their eyes glazed over when I spoke,

like I was some mad woman on the subway

                              ranting about how she’s met God.

I’m not saying you have to believe me.
I just want you to hear: I’ve touched

when the world was holy.

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