Guest poet: Kelly Sawin

"Altogether it is grace..."

photo by the author

Ecclesiology

I.
In Solomon’s bed: frankincense, aloe, myrrh;
a woman’s wrists adorned in gold. The smell
of a king, a priest, a sacrifice. The humid smell
as one flesh clambers toward its other self.
And what is marriage if not sex? If not to take
the live and moistening skin of the man you love
delicately between your teeth? To feel his press
against you. Marriage being a physical process
of such enormous dimension that it multiplies
matter and soul, gives love a form and face and
a crying, suckling will. What is marriage if not
the smell of orange trees wafting in through
the open window in the cool gray of night? If not
the sweet and human smell of milk that comes
flowing through the valley of a woman’s warm
and beating chest. If not the scented air of the room,
purple fabric tossed across the bed, the ionic
charge carried by wind through the window and
cleansing any stasis—which is to say, illness,
which is to say the arrow toward death. But not
here. Not in this bed, in this house, in this mist
of live and dancing perfume. Of writhing breath.
Of the child at peace in his sleep of love. This
corporeal temple. Temple in every sense.

II.
Dill fireworks beside the cucumber twirling up
the fence: did the gardener know the reason
they love each other is the soil they together create?
The acidity, the microbes, the mycelial surge
they build around themselves. The marriage bed
they lay for themselves around their breathing
roots. How a blueberry seed will not die in whatever
odd soil it finds, but will instead create for itself
the acid it needs to breathe; that the living symphony
we call soil will lick up the sugar the plant wrings
out in its beg for love, which is life: the handkerchief
it seductively drops and the biota that clutches it up.
The companion plant clutching it up and finding
it breathes easy in that same humic air.

III.
This is what the gardener knows: that grace is there
in the soil. That there is a concert where it happens.
Not just the fungi, eukaryotic in its liturgy and language,
not just the microbes with their cilial hands moving fast
in their strange and occult work, and not just the archaea’s
silent prayer. Altogether it is grace: to take the spotted
fruit fallen plump from the vine; to take the profile of the young
dead rabbit with its glassy, vacant eye; to take the withered stalk
and severed root and turn the clock of all of it forward—which
is to say back again, to life. Where is grace if not in these lowest
reaches? In this realm of the base, the despised, the small. O
wise and mighty, it happens beneath your feet, and lower still.

Kelly Sawin is a poet living and mothering in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Her work has appeared in River Teeth, the Appalachian Review, Susurrus, the Hollins Critic, Volume, and elsewhere. She was a finalist in the 2024 National Poetry Series, a semifinalist in the 2024 Orison Poetry Prize, and she holds an MFA from Hollins University.