The Relic

All the way home, I kept thinking of the lost
finger of St. Teresa, displayed
in the gift shop of a convent where she spent
most of her life being thrown by the devil
down the stairs or gripping the handrail
after communion, so others wouldn’t see
how it took all of her strength to keep
her body from flying away. A wild hen,
a fighting breed, she still broods over Avila,
as if she could hatch that penurious flock
into God’s generosity. Now as then,
they grasp and peck, scraping—too poor to mock—
God’s cold stone nest. For pilgrimage,
all they have left is her finger, a relic

of her body—often disputed,
buried elsewhere, periodically dug up
for proof of incorruptibility. It was said
for centuries, she refused decay,
though at each exhumation, a little less
of her was left: a hand was taken for a monastery,
a splinter of sternum for the Empress,
and the peasants, well, took what they could get,
a woman bent to kiss her feet to bite
off a big toe. “They go around crying
about the devil or longing for a sign,”
she scolded, waving, perhaps, this finger,
though, probably, without this clot of green,
this emerald ring that makes one doubt

all vow of poverty . . . Is the digit
even hers at all, or that of some fuck-me
lady, thought lovely enough to stand in
for a saint’s? If godliness requires
beauty, then her finger of insult—flung
at God after a horse bucked her into a stream
you have so few friends because you treat them
so badly—has an afterlife of gem.
Life as a nun would be purgatory,
but better than an eternity in hell.
Yet it’s her body that lingers in limbo.
A cloud of delicate mold—the halo
of God upon this earth, fine as an angel’s hair—
clings to her finger, tries to call her home.