Yes, “most willingly,” Francis would speak to him.
“But first honor thy friends who have invited thee to feast.”
(All things in time, at time’s pace,
so that time and earth might be valued.)
And then the gift—a mountain: shaven heads,
measuring prayer, two of the wiser friars
on the periphery, where the only voice they heard
was God’s: in green leaf, the drinking of water
against sunny banks, refracted feet—how it thirsted one,
for the Spirit and for how he meant things;
while the soldiers: in issued boots, the company swill
that grumbled long before rations.
Everyone there beginning in that place everyone does,
out of the place he had settled on: the glamourless gospel,
accomplished through repetition, the showing up:
the time beneath time were time noun enough—
grace and movement, and it’s the effort that stays,
the long and quiet patience of God.
Eventually, Masseo de Marignano, Angelo Tancredi,
and Leo, the slow, go with him: James, Peter, John;
they watch him ascend, arms outstretched,
prayers lost in the murmuring leaves.
This was just one more place they could not go:
the slow patrol, the troop with too many voices.
Like us, they knew half the way there: the hand
half-outstretched, the smile plainly given.
When he came down, in strength not his own,
the brothers got him an ass: a different one—
an owner with something to say. “Be nothing
less than people—hope of thee.”
Sitting at the foot of the mountain,
ridiculous as the pigeons on his head, his legs,
a bird dropping on his robe, Francis smiled,
his back against a tree. “God is pleased,” he said,
“because so much joy is shown by our sisters, the birds.”
Men rolled to their feet, followed in the morning mist,
quiet as a suburban lawn, all the mowers asleep.
II
The second consideration of the holy stigmata
(Preparation)
Orlando heaped up food to crowd
the hermit’s appetite, wine to wet the failing eye.
Having been fathered himself, Francis opened
under that canopy: the singing of rain on leaves,
like his old happiness, back when stars and clouds
were his great company. Among towering beeches,
God’s green hands, only death now between them,
the garden stretching skyward: there before the moon
was moon, cooled as it was, in an egress of geese,
he knew what his brothers needed from him:
that he see who he was. So he walked mountain fissures,
for the congealed, us, who for want of praise
find ourselves split, other. Brothers watched him rise,
bring back their sins, chose, not surprisingly,
wider orbits, around him, themselves.
An angel consoled: “The order stays—the order stays;
even the foulest, if he love the brothers,
mercy,” a laundry list for the pure of heart.
“Many will be perfect.”
So encouraging his want, he fasted on her life—
where the only voice Mary probably heard
was her own, hanging laundry.
Little tramps: the saint running a Chaplinesque Leo
back and forth to mountain shouting,
finally finding a place where no one
could hear him, inspect.
In silence, Francis would be elsewhere:
a healthy fool made to lie down
and lose what he had grown to love: his ridiculous life,
spooned out of his mouth for his kin, lifted up
like the joyful paralytic, through the roof of heaven.
And because Francis was so small, a devil came:
leaved, licking the hunch on its back—
finally humped, hunkering away
like a sputtering machine clamped to its nut,
without savor, sinking deeper into that desperate glee,
where the only thing to enjoy is self
humoring self, audience of one, returns
diminishing. (And decades later, that same limp
shook a friar between his teeth, spat him down,
the brother crying out as he fell, log bridge on his head.
In an instant, Francis placed him—completed
at the bottom. Meanwhile, his brothers, who had heard the voice
and come for the body, were amazed, found it,
singing, a small log still on his head. What could they do?
They sang as well: the chasm, some with clumps of dirt
on their heads, some arm in arm,
each looking foolish enough to stick out.)
Because Francis was no leader they came,
because he never knew what to say. This time
it would be a bird who would remind him
just how much he needed. It would wake him
for matins, singing or beating its wings.
He’d rise, crack his knuckles, or not when his bones
refused the call, the cold giving-way in them,
when he could feel each move toward parchment:
hollow and gaunt, hungry as his feasting self.
It would sit with him, push pebbles,
his fingers around in the dirt.
III
The third consideration of the holy stigmata
(Gifts)
Yellow-faced, sweaty, in the torch descending,
Leo saw it rest on Francis’ head, an absent voice