Now that my mother, as others say, has passed,
I like to visit churches that display
the miraculously intact bodies of saints
in glass cases. Sometimes the hem of their carved garment
is smooth from being touched. No one but Bernadette
ever saw the beautiful smiling child in white
who called herself Immaculate, but thousands
came to Lourdes to watch her witnessing
that miracle. Even the faithful, it seems,
require an intermediary between themselves
and what’s invisible. In each of us, my mother thought,
there exists a hidden essence, mostly evident
as pain or desire or the compulsion to repeat,
not immortal soul but the unconscious. Her life’s work
was to find and comfort it. In buses, the blind,
lame and dying still make pilgrimages
to Lourdes. Past the kitschy shops, the spring
Bernadette scrabbled in the dirt to find,
and the porch cluttered with abandoned
canes and wheelchairs, they press their hair and faces
against the muddy wall, the enormous church
behind them affirming an uncontaminated world
in the midst of escalating misery and also
the body in pain. I don’t believe
my mother is immortal or scattered
over the earth or even alive in me.
But in dreams, which are how the unconscious
speaks, redundantly, in puns and symbols,
she sometimes appears, often thin and naked
but occasionally healthy, wearing her elegant
work clothes, and sits with me beside
a hanging garden like the wondrous,
vanished one in Babylon, in which
the flowers, because they are so heavy,
bloom abundantly, their weight enabling
the blooming, then greater heaviness and more blooming.