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64 vespers beginning as sheep tallow in the hands of a priest St. Ignatius, Montana, 1856 No less important than the light is what it falls on: penitent coil of wick rising from clay floor to scraps of tallow shaped into the candle hung (bare wall, three nails, the casual horror of the iron) beside a window open this spare March evening to homeward geese, their mist-parting calls, a rainfrock above mountains we named Mission for the building we built beneath them.  By now it’s another life’s list: a pasture veiled in frost where a frost-colored mare lowers her head to graze; a kite without a wind to fill it; the quilt laid across my mother (its blue of washed and sunbaked stones) whose wheezing kept time with the rocking chair the plump monsignor always chose, his Saint Louis habit of talking at great lengths about books he’d never read; her dress hanging still wet on the line, mothlit 65 as I prayed her passage was; brotherless, keeperless, a blackbird flying so quickly west the coming, evening sky fails to darken.  I live beneath these mountains, as if beneath the stoppage of time: snow-blanketed distance, the clouds’ one encumbrance. As if beneath the last statues worthy of adoration, the remaining uncorrupted, snow gathered atop them as on the shoulders of the dead. And these tribes, the dying dead-to-be: I pray they seal up those things uttered by the seven tongues and write them not, for we novitiate have failed to learn, even with the fat of the Lamb on our hands, any of their rectitude. Even with the valley’s light lapidary in the canyon creases, the two rivers joining limpidly.—If God is for us, who can be against us? Besides God? ...

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