Wild Onions

A Memoir of West Texas and St. Mary's Academy

I

The desks of the girls of childhood

Like bronze mirrors still hold their love and attention,

Where their gilded faces read slowly: God-

Or practice their Byzantine flowers of cursive.

u

Against a red wall some boys blast erasers,

The girls play around their concrete Virgin.

The northers have pitted her blue cloaking,

She looks like a soldier, and begs with missing hands.

ul

The word of God is a woman,

We chant into her black hood,

Our holiness wears very thick glasses;

Her eyes are aquariums, the bright weeds, fierce,

warm-bodied fishes.

IV

In the mouth the flesh of God is paper,

Our Chief's tablets are scotched with the wings and

legs of bugs;

The fat priest mutters a dead tongue,

And raises on high the wonder, a host as big as a poker

chip.

v

Our souls are circled on the blackboard,

The freckled is venial, the harshly-filled, mortal;

I study the baroque whorls and latticework of the

thumb,

The untouched, the perfect zero, is holy.

VI

In spring the prairie dries, cracks

Into the map of a million continents;

We stare outside at the worrying buffalo grasses,

By noon the dust will turn the sun to bread and blood.

vil

Holsinger, Christiansen, Klock,

Of immortal beauty these are my first, pale examples,

Love always wearing the same dress,

Dark and stiff as a naval uniform.

VII

On the playground the children are quick,

The bright mellifiore of pheasants,

Our parents work at a store or are machinery for gas

fields,

We'll study for love at the Double Dip in Amarillo.

IX

Around the grotto the boys eat wild onion,

The dare, our spring fruit, the bitter communion;

When we rise to chew out our blue catechism,

The flesh glosses like petroleum, each face is plain as a

dime.