Nothing. I can’t construct a sentence able to withhold
the weight of it; I can’t explain or calculate the kind of weight
I mean, what it is that I am with or holding.
In high school a teacher explained the difference between
metaphor and simile in terms of distance. I imagined like
or as as a door cracked, light intruding like light. How
to simile the distance between myself and my body,
a depth through which no light can intrude? Good start,
my teacher would say, but that’s not a very original metaphor.
Language fails. Or I fail language.
Maybe I am unoriginal. Maybe there’s nothing
new to say about suffering, that blade severing saints
from their bodies, each red lash lessening the distance
between them and God.
Better, my high school teacher would say, but in writing towards
God are you writing away from the body again?
St. Teresa of Ávila experienced pain as ecstasy as divinity,
sharp-arrowed, aimed with such blesséd terror at the softest parts
of her. This has nothing to do with my experience except in the idea
of sharpening. Piercing.
In the reliquary of my bed I arrange my bones in a position
that in other contexts could be considered prone, which is too often
considered holy.
In pain I am consumed by a force that feels divine, i.e., it can contain
all but leaves room for nothing but itself.
I can no longer locate the door dividing myself and my body,
not even a crack of it limned by light. I can’t remember
the luxury of belief. That one day my soul will split the body
with its light and move somewhere else, which will be better
because it isn’t body.
I cannot construct a theology in which soul exists
as anything separate or blessed.
I think the stones are saints and the saints are stories
we tell to convince ourselves that pain is purpose, a kindness
with which God brings us closer to his gilt-edges.
I fail. I cannot construct.
St. Teresa of Ávila imagined within herself a multi-walled castle
and deep within that castle, like the most dangerous prisoner, God.
I imagine within myself a nothing insisting it’s everything
shrunk to the tip of an arrow, piercing.
Well then, my high school teacher would say,
where are you going to go with all of this?
Nowhere and everywhere. All grit and irritant.
I oyster the walls of my castle shut.
