“In God’s good time we reached the ‘Cumbre’ which is the topmost height that can be crossed in the neighborhood of Aconcagua and here we remained some time.”
-St. Francis Xavier Cabrini, Travels and Letters
I
The tiny saint got the best mule
Though an opera singer was in the party
And St. Joseph the muleteer was gentle
And helped a lot; providentially,
Because the soundest beast leads
And she had never ridden and was jittery
Trying to guide! Though she learned
Early to be passive to the sea.
Small and without weight as she was
She could have risen into the saddle
Or St. Joseph would have tossed her humbly
Could she have put her foot
Into his hand, but she could not,
Ascending rather from upon a chair;
And gathered the band with Mother Chiara
And set off cowled in furs
Like a monk (her saving comment)
Or Xavier in the mountains of the orient.
II
And the air in the high Andes
Was thin and lucid as milk
Or fire, or as violets she sailed
In boats in Lombardy,
A child afraid of the water
But sick for the fire and milk
Of the sea’s wake and for the souls
That flashed like fish
For the souls that love like milk
And like fire, for the spring soul
That bursts quiet as a violet
And swings upon its thin
Stem to flame at the sun,
Ridiculous as a nun.
III
Could she have known the pressure
Here will bleed the skin
Or that the muleteers would be
Too busy to say the Rosary
That she would fail to jump her mule
Across a crevasse would fall
Into St. Joseph’s arms
And faint in the snow bank that flanks
The rim (the heights of her cheeks
More pale more glowing than crystal
That flashed at her habit, vanishing-eyes
As they opened as soft as furs)
Or had she somehow discovered
She’d spend the evening with Mother
Chiara sitting in a bar
At the pampas’ edge: she would lead
The pilgrimage again
Across the high Andes,
Forego the closed cabin
The turn around the horn, would climb
Would rest the party at the Cumbre
Again draw breath and for a moment again
Would turn away forever
IV
Air shivered in the Andes
As full of color as blood
Or bells, or ice the saboteurs
Had left on Lytle street
When sad about the sick wops she brought there
They opened the mansion pipes;
What was this to her
Who dynamites hearts rivets,
Quarries, shapes bricks, and built
In Chicago two hospitals
Besides the one they chilled a bit
And burned a little while.
But they kicked the sisters
Out of Nicaragua-the schoolgirls
No trash these, necks blue
As Andes snow thin as moons
Hair black as the bird-live valleys;
The saint was away on business
The New Orleans orphanage or the Villa
Or the novitiate at old Manresa
On the Hudson. (Perhaps the hotel
In Seattle?) Trouble in France too,
Since the Archbishop was on the Riviera,
And the priests turned her a cold
Parisian shouder, but she moved in
At a gilt estate where the sisters
Put up sheets over the many mirrors.
But whether on their continents
Or ours the austere skirts
Were strangest brushing by the summerhouse
In Rio the intemperate flower parts:
Though here the black was closest
To the holy red that flowed her into God,
In Chicago, upon her martyrdom.
She should have died in Lombardy
Safe from a saint’s life and the travelers’
Malady that chilled her and brightened
Her gown, like a bell she jangled in her room,
Having said good morning to God.
V
A good mule like God’s will and the sea
Does not mind those who disagree
And bore her safely
So that, the stars at easy
Height again, the party
Rested.
But the pampas at night are a sky
Where masses alive and unknown
Are relieved by constellations of bone.
VI
High cold keen is the Cumbre air A
s the light from the stone and shattering stars
But there is nowhere mountain air
So cold or keen or bright or
Thin as is Francesca’s wrist
Humming hyaline
Along the risen limb
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