Adoro Te Devote



saints: visitation
s.lee 


 *Adoro Te Devote

sight, touch, and taste in thee are each

deceived; the ear alone most safely believed

                                                    Thomas Aquinas

                                                     Adoro Te Devote


Maybe to alienate the deepest aches

the chant is held holy as the Lourdes

water cupped and dropped with a pipette

into the cave of the ear.  My father said

water seeks its own source, and aided

by the pressure of all the hands

and feet, the decades of passing

the dent of weight in the same places--

blonder now if  it's pine enough and

somehow stronger but not, only come to

rely on the entire rack the house is

stacked on.  I'd want today a way to place

the strangest with the mundane or not so much

the mundane as what is and what has been

always taken: taken for granted (excuse

the cliche) taken for trash, taken for nothing

but a song.  I'll cash in and come to hum

from my own obbligato: how the boy can still

reach his high solo while the monks pour

their tongued libations into the beginning

and ending of things in practiced and finally

equal measure--the beauty they shape

and empty from their open mouth and throat 

and tone by tone pray it to the home it is 

sung for, which is different, somehow, because our wounds

are large, aren't they, and variegated, and held

to the sky kaleidoscopic, and every day, 

every day they are sung, in every visitation every 

liturgical hour without fail from lauds to compline


*photo: replica the adams memorial (on view 

at the currier, manchester, nh)

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