Well Bottom Blues

I am reading On A Wednesday Night poems from the creative writing workshop at the University of New Orleans, and discovered a saint story I don’t recall from my confirmation Book of Saints. That is likely because I had the boy’s edition, from which we were to select our confirmation name. I chose Thomas after Aquinus because books were my love.

St. Dymphna,  known as the Lily of Éire (here full story is here), is the patron saint of mental illness, and well into the 20th Century the people of Geel, Belgium have welcomed patrons seeking relief from her into their homes, where they are known as boarders.

Dymphna peaked my interest for the same reason I started this blog, my recovery not just from mental illness but from the debilitating side effects of psychopharmacoloy. (Explained here and further here and here. In brief, a delayed diagnosis of Bi-Polar and the medications which I desperately needed at the time (around 2015) eventually shutoff my creative function, deadened the higher associate through required to read and write poetry.

I am reading and writing again, hence my encounter with this poem (quoted at length below pending the poet’s permission or masquerading as fair use). I have a poem for which the line “Death is never too soon among us,/ said the forest.” will be an epigraph sometime soon no doubt. I have long wanted to go to Amtserdam and Brugge. I think Geel is now on my Belgian itinerary.

Dirt Heart

By Jessicn Morey-Collings

after Darcie Dennigan

Bristly Dymphna, slipped from your unhinged father, your castle shrinks in its quills.
I rub eyes before your armaments. Your spires are filed
too sharply. My notes hold no
more acuity than your cedar scent.

Oh Damon, Dymphna’s father, straddling a casket, a canyon, a sea-you won’t
summon your dead wife from your daughter’s body.
Just over the Celtic’s whitecaps she waits: your run-off daughter in God’s light,
shedding coins.

The worst ghosts I’ve ever known are my own greedy fingers.

In the seventh century, as a seed at the center of the mountain, I could hear
the bell-call of Dymphna’s pure heart to the headsick. Some asked her to dispel
bog-thoughts,
some wanted the cobwebs mopped from their eyes & so cried out to her.

Few, if any, begged soup or shoe-leather. No, her virgin magic!
I listened my brain-quiver ached for her cooling prayers..

My ears thrummed with dirt, rock & thicker than earthskin. I was only rumor & new
before my human birth. The earth. The dirty dirt. The spring-green of Dymphna
springing. I am un-rattled by the bell-call of her pure heart.

Did you feel the un-fucked mist of her twisting over the sea-top, the father-groom
looming his sword over the ocean? Her star-clean promise smelled
like lamplight in an old growth forest then. Death is never too soon among us,
said the forest. Return to that earth-dirt you came from, said the forest,
ask Dymphna’s monkish escort how clammy the girl’s hand felt as they fled.

I was potential and a vein of quartz, then. Just energy and a dust-dragged hem.
Mountain-swallowed, I was a mouth out of which a fawn could wobble,
little Dymphna, dainty fawn made of twigs and spit and shivers,
while your father coughed up his lost wife across the English Channel.

Pretty-stricken Christian, saint of quill-backed reputations quivering,
patron of the snot-sob ashamed in the shower, of the self-sliced skins,
if I ask you to tan my baby animal into leather, to beat me broader-chested,
I am asking to stay buried, next time—

I don’t want to feel much more than dirt next time I’m born.