The Church of Mt. Carmel
I’ll be carried out the door in the mock-adobe wall . . .
midweek, on a day without a witness—the eucalyptus
refusing to rearrange a single leaf in loss.
A day well after the afternoons of empty roads
and pimiento boughs, but some time before
the hills sink back into the sea . . . a day beyond
recall despite the lemon verbena, pittosporum,
and Bermuda grass lightly on the air. . . .
In back, the classrooms will have long surrendered
beneath a veil of silt, salt air smudging the windows,
or perhaps it’s a final Bible History lesson no one learned
drifting off in chalk? Who knows what will become
of the frayed rope ends of the bells, of the escaping
clouds—or the bundles of sticks I finally set down
alongside my over-valued assets from the estate
of irony, that had theories for it all?
——————————————————All of it
likely purposeless, in the end—as my brown shoes,
as my mouth of ashes kissing the butter-colored poppies,
their small bright fists shaking at the sky.
Here are my personal effects—the agave and adobe walls,
the rain showers, the black & white light of the ‘50s
taken up in faithful opposition to the blue, to a heaven
against which even the wind was driven to its knees.
After the Edson Smith Photo Collection Our Lady of Mt. Carmel
Christopher Buckley grew up in Montecito and attended Our Lady of Mt. Carmel school. His most recent book of poetry is The Pre-Eternity of the World (Stephen F. Austin State Univ. Press, 2021). He has recently edited The Long Embrace: Contemporary Poets on the Long Poems of Philip Levine (Lynx House Press, 2020); and Naming the Lost: The Fresno Poets—Interviews and Essays (Stephen F. Austin State Univ. Press, 2021).