4 POEMS
CARMINE STARNINO

DID YOU SAY YOUR PRAYERS?
I did. Hands clamped, kneeling, I radioed my S.O.S.
into the coldest reaches of my six-year old cosmos
and waited. They were simple prayers, standard distress
calls. Afterwards, my bed became a listening-post

homing in on every sound around me, the night's ceiling
sickle-mooned and starless. If it was a "step" that led
me closer to God, there was an evanescence to the feeling
prayer left behind: a wet footprint that soon started

to fade. Older, I learned to use the rosary, each tiny
bead I tweaked between my fingertips a spiritual
dollop I could measure. I prayed for friends, for family,
my every concern calculable, although miniscule

in its unit scale. I stopped that too. Each night I fussed
with a metaphysical ledger -- how much I'd asked for
versus how much I'd given back. The rosary, an abacus
I grew tired of. But I've begun to miss it, prayer, or

maybe not exactly prayer, mostly just the suspense
of an answer. I like to think those childhood signals
still travel through deepest space, and if not his absence,
God's silence the reason I now count these syllables.

SAINTS
St. Sebaldus tapped two icicles to spark a flame.
St. Florian doused a blaze with a glass of water.
St. Wennelin can himself be invoked against fires

because one, during his lifetime, snuffed itself
when his name was uttered. The cherry tree's
brief, begrudging miracle of white blossoms

bores me. And if I never have to hear another
song sparrow or eastern bluebird it will be
too soon: I want real wonders. So you can keep

your autumn with its surfeit of colored leaves
mass-produced to impress. Give me St. Adelelm
in a storm, at night, with a one-of-a-kind candle

that stayed lit until he found refuge. Give me
the withered tree that promptly burst into leaf
when the crowd pushed St. Zenobius against it.

SAINTS, AGAIN
On display in a cathedral in Naples is a vial
of red substance said to be St. Gennaro's blood
which liquefies and bubbles at certain times

of the year. The spiritual temperature at which
this happens can probably be attributed to unique
confluence of faith and expectation. The same

mixture which gave St. Francis of Paola's cloak
sufficient wood-buoyancy to boat him across
the Strait of Messina; that furred St. Wilgefortis'

cheeks with a full beard to help her discourage
a suitor; or freighted St. Peter Martyr's words
with enough sincerity to persuade the brothers

of his Order that the female voices overheard
in his cell at night were St. Cecilia, St. Catherine
and St. Agnes, each visiting him from heaven.

EX VOTO
Upon visiting the ex voto sanctuary in Pompeii.
I
It's 1927, and the doctor's stumped as to what's unraveling
your mother's health to the feverish, frayed, penumbral
edge of life. You say a prayer, and wait for the intervening
selvage of God's rescue. The ex voto, then, is the grateful

emblem of that blessing. The scene is painted. Its message
furnished by chairs, a night-table with medicine, the testimonial
of relatives around the bed, and the sick woman vomiting
blood onto a cloth. Other ex votos are spare and elliptical,

find their devotion in the specificity of a detail. A walking
stick, a crutch, a cast, a splinter, a gall-stone. Or they're small
sheets of sliver embossed with the body-part once evaporating
with illness. A leg, an arm, a hand. All nailed to the wall.

II
If I had to choose I'd choose the shipwreck, how their votive
veers into art: sudden wind, eruption of ocean (its deep blue
bruised black by a darker sky, then dabbed with white to revive
the distressed surface of the water), one end of a schooner

swatted down by a backwash of waves. There's a persuasive
terror to these storms. Artists who never forgot to imbue
each swell with musculature. Or include a deck's plunge and heave
tossing a sailor overboard. Details make the adventure true.

Maria di Pompeii, writes one survivor, in beautiful cursive,
sank in the water of Montecristo on 15th April 1911. Crew
miraculously safe. The ship's being pulled under. Its prow, a sieve
sifting out the extraordinary. A rowboat provides the clue.

III
A stagecoach tips over -- the two horses galloping too near
the edge of a ditch -- and the door swings open on the mystery
of little Clorinda Carola's escape from death. The kids never
get off easy. Lauretta Zanfardino slips right through a balcony

railing. Maria Caccia is snared by some vertiginous stairs.
Gaetano Casillo's son tumbles off a fasting-moving cart, his body
nearly crushed by its wheels. Rosaria Lambiase's daughter
plummets the length of a cliff, arms out, knees bent slightly,

like an acrobat, afloat, reaching for the bar, or a figure-skater,
after a jump, touching down on the ice. Look up, you'll see
Impaziente Guiseppa's bad luck with a train: mid-flail, mid-air,
doused in a brightness spotlighting her fall. She lands safely.

IV
In fact, almost everyone recovers. Take the freakish circumstance
of Alfredo Rispoli's home collapsing as though a hurricane
funneled down and frisked the walls into an efflorescence
of fragments. He survived. His ex voto lauding his sanctioned

ransom from death. But sometimes there's no second chance,
the ex voto too small a hinge to swing your prayer between
the longed-for rescue and its fulfillment. A routine resurgence
is no doubt what Antonio and Maria Luongo expected when

they painted their sick-bed drama. We ask God's omnipotence
for the return to health of our ill child. I'm left with the pain
I imagine at the final outcome: the wall catalogues no subsequent
praise for a miracle granted. The ex voto now elegy, not paean.

THE END

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