What The Priest Asked of The Wind

The wind and moon aren’t guiltless tonight, so I’m inside, hands cupped, head bent,
      spinning ice cubes around a tumbler, and thinking of the sun.
The table’s bathed in slatted moonlight, while I try to keep my mind elsewhere;
      buthere the girls dance and spin,
here the dresses rise and fall.
Bless ‘em, though,
they pretend to see beyond
the collar in my pocket,
to think I’m not thinking
of them and their sins.
And the one in the middle,
with her stupid, faithless boyfriend,

I know her mother well, this Girl,
who came to me today for my
absolution; to kneel and wait
for the partition to snikt open.
I paused before giving in, though,
before, in a panting whisper, burdened
with an unseen shame, she began.
“Forgive me father, for I have sinned…”
She was a thief, this girl,
endowed with a wealthy roommate
who wouldn’t miss a hundred dollars.

Her story seemed typical, as I watch.
The secret preparation,
the painting of her faults,
the hiding of a cross
between blouse and skin.
After lying, waiting for others to sleep,
it’d be a practiced Catholic quiet
that carried her through the window,
onto the roof,
in her standard issue school skirt.
You can almost see it rise,
the moon,
as she drops from a convenient tree branch

The new moon fall affords
her one last chance,
to perfect her reflection.
Through the window
I picture her
adjusting herself
in little ways.
(in later versions,
later fantasies,
I see her
clutching her
stomach,
then, of course, her
cross)

Clearing the back gate-
avoiding it’s revealing creak
only to catch her slip on
a picket-
she’d dart down the driveway
to meet her boyfriend’s waiting car.
“Rural Route 101 is a straight shot to Biloxi,”
she reminded me,“but you pass
silent windmills turning lily pollen
under guiltless harvest moons.”
Her voice grew close to collapsing,
I saw tears appear at the corner of
blue eyes.
And I pried, eager
to hear how the young sinner
enjoyed
her roommate’s taken money.
She stopped, though, unable,
and I reluctantly yielded what she had come for;
just my absolution.

Later that same morning
when her boyfriend came to confess,
(for her parents, not his)
and in a bravery befitting a false convert,
he bragged of how he parked his “baby”-
two grand, all under the hood-
engines revving over his girl’s mysterious trip
to the city. “She came, all right,” he drawled,
“and I kept her purrin’ an dark until well out earshot.
I sped the whole way,”
he confessed,
“and while Jackie was doin’
some woman’s thing”
-that’s all he’d ever know-
“I visited a, well, ‘brothel.’”
He chuckles, I give unfollowed instructions,
and he leaves
behind a shutting partition.

Staring into a motionless cup,
water-downed whiskey staring back,
I think of empty words,
and days spent in judgment,
waving a sign aside Jaclyn’s mother-
Whores On A Straight Shot To Hell, it said- (the desired effect, anyway)
splattering pigs’ blood on doctors and donors.
I know this corner well, where Jaclyn
needed a hundred stolen dollars
for ‘some woman’s thing’.
I spent many days there,
protesting, condemning.
Blocks from the best whorehouse in Biloxi,
with my picket waving like God’s middle finger,
I was condemning
the only affordable
Planned Parenthood.
(forgive me,
for this,
this is my
Confession)