At seventeen I gazed a good ten minutes
at Saint Catherine Labouré’s incorruptible
palms around a rosary. Soon 
I’d learn to drive a manual transmission, 
the backward N of the ascending gears. 
The still-war had been on for more than a year, 
and there was something so similarly earned 
in her un-atrophied grip. I knew 
someone must’ve tended in secret to 
the wax around her hands and face, and 
that they’d given themselves a soldier’s 
kind of grace, balancing deception against 
the miracle it presented, like the clutch 
and gas pedals at the moment of change. 
It took a while to find the feel for it—
the confidence to hover between the two. 
In the end it was something like joy, but 
greedier. Like flying back across the ocean 
to a peaceful country, where nothing decays.