Washington, DC, 1998.
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Her heart a bruise on the Christ-flesh suffered out of locked agonies
of rebirth.
Her soul fierced inward upon the extravagant passion of woman
cut between somber and radiant choices.
Her lips panting the Name of God as she thrusts out the tip of her
tongue for one more drop of His nerving grace.
Solitary Rose! What wall could entomb her? She is all polish &
ecstasy.
She is all passion, all fire & devotion. She is all woman, in love of
God bitten by the rapture of God.
She sounds through my mind thirsting the inconceivable excellence
of Christ:
I hear her feet like rain-clashes run the flat streets to do His will.
All ache. Her heart the glorified Wound. Her soul curls back on
its pang as the toes of the Christ clutched back on that Nail.
In the stigmata of His gaze her love coils like the flesh on its iron,
the love-ache of the opening.
When she utters the Holy Name you could never doubt God died
for the love of man.
Solitary Rose! Unspeakable primacy! The masked & dangerous
glint of implication!
The gleam of death in the knives of her desire! The crescendoes
thirsted in the strings of her passion!
I have seen in her eyes destinies expand and race out beyond the
apogees of perfection!
She catches them all! Birds beak for her! In the click of her teeth
she bites little pieces!
Dance! Dance! Never stint that torrential heart, girl and mother,
holy immolation,
Free as none else of the vice of the self: that narrow hoard of unbroachable
stinking!
In the lift of her head earth glints and sparkles! The seethe of her
voice is pure as the ecstasy of fire in ice!
Solitary Rose! The Spanish pride! The Aztec death! The Mexican
passion! The American hope!
Woman of the Christ-hurt aching in moan! God-thirster! Beautiful
inviolable well-deep of passion!
In the fiercest extravagant love is the tangible source of all wisdom!
In the sprint of your exquisite flesh is evinced the awesome recklessness
of God's mercy!
Brother Antoninus
Oyez Number Two.
Copyright (C) 1964 by Borther Antoninus,
O.P.
Cum Permissu Superiorum. Printed for Oyez by the Auerhahn Press, San Francisco.