Susan Kelly-DeWitt’s is the author of The Fortunate Islands (Marick  Press), eight previous small press collections and a new online chapbook,  Season of Change (Mudlark No, 46). Her poems can also be found in   many journals and in anthologies such as (most recently) The Autumn House  Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (Autumn House Press), A Bird as  Black as the Sun: California Poets on Crows and Ravens (Green Poets  Press)  and in The City of the Big Shoulders: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry (University of Iowa Press). She has also been an exhibiting Northern  California visual artist for twenty-five years. Visit her website at www. susankelly-dewitt.com  for  more information.

 
This morning we walked the neighborhood—cool  breeze, partly 
cloudy sky above the canopy of leaves. A magpie  invited us to join
him for a while (his tuxedo lacked a bowtie). He  could have been a waiter
or a butcher gussied up to wed (wait:  let me harness an errant line: blood is the garnet
sash on the flesh of a soldier. Graveyard rhetoric. A line for a poet-general. Major segue:
dogwood’s blood, out of the blue--) Canopy, panoply of leaves…  Later: Sleep.
We walked a neighborhood of clouds—smoke was rising from a lake, its cold 
patina. Then the lake was the smoke. An old woman  handed me a paper 
fortune—“The only certainty is that nothing is  certain” (proverb posing 
as fortune). After that God dropped in as a  dragonfly in garnet drag 
and I begged It for mercy. The fortune became a  harness. God could have
been a waiter or a butcher or a soldier, but arrived as a dragonfly in that smoky 
emirate. I woke and consulted Jung. Anyone who takes the sure road is as good 
as  dead. Those words then in my partly cloudy head.                                           
  

The Reliquary of St. Therese of Lisieux 
Comes to the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament 

                                Cameras flash: */*/*/ 
                                             Briefly

 the Little Flower lived 
 with a holy ardor. 
 
I will let fall from heaven a shower 
of  roses, she wrote, tubercular. Everything is 
grace.  An overhead speaker signals:                                                      
  
Five minutes left
before the bones disappear,                                                                 
whisked away in an Explorer, 

to a convent in the hills. Panic 
                         surges—--
                         all of us gathered here to see, to touch 
                                       the plexiglass dome 
                          that houses the bones 
           in the gold-trimmed 
 box of 
 jacaranda wood. 
                
                         Everyone shoves,
cutthroat: hope’s mob. 
  
                                       (It could rain blood
                                       instead of roses.)
  
                                                             
                                                         --Sacramento CA, January, 2000