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Jerome Mazzaro 171 The Caves of Love Jerome Mazzaro (1996) Lodged in the early morning, in dark pews, away from the main aisle, each week they wind sniffling and wheezing closer to life’s end, gray faces grown as doubtful as church dues, where just their clothes, grown shabbier and odd, and their own body smells increase each week, as lighted, perfumed candles stall the reek and incense curves man’s worldly thoughts to God. Listless and nasal, seeping as some mist, the stale air grows more stagnant with their drone, invading both my thinking and their own, like some marred surface giving way to rust as their own homes give way each year to rot, the ruin offset, they hope, by stronger love or obligation to brute force above. They draw to trappings like an opiate. Hobbled and humpbacked, bobbing as they move, they seem as trolls or victims of long wars, their outer forms betraying inner scars. And winter does make this place seem a cave. Light barely breaks in through the speckled air, and echoes hollow in their each response. A cave remembered from a legend once— a Venusberg or hill or dragon’s lair. I try to think on them as they were young— their parents beaming in a Sunday best— bright children at a First Communion feast eager to taste God with each pushing tongue, cowed by the sisters as they must have been; and how the aging sisters struggle hard, failing to keep quick children on their guard who follow them each year in one communion. They pray for their own soul’s recovery, the hardy independence of the old, 172 the caves of love and for lapsed children, missing from the fold, cut off like lambs by gorse along the way, knowing how all youth go to meet the world, fresh with illusion, eager to begin, and how a world’s indifference shuts them in. Each meek adjustment spots an inner mold. It is a club for which I seem the priest, where just the dying gain full membership and only death can free one from its grip— a horror club, whose restless coughs persist and camphor makes one wish he’d never come. But who can face a world devoid of love? Quiet and anxious, keeping hopes alive, I feel the dwindling number bulk like doom. ...

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