Garnets

I’m glad he’s gone my father said.
But that was the beginning
Of my obsession with garnets.

He did cure my husband in the end,
Just as I had jokingly wished
Hoped requested. Begged,
Prayed even. Haha but what if.

The pope thought I was pregnant,
He blessed my belly. I smiled in the picture
And looked exactly like McLovin,
Anyone could have seen what I actually
Was – great celestial gaylords
Were painting the ceiling –
But the pope believed McLovin
Was a woman with child.

He was so relieved. He knew at last
What he was looking at – maybe everything
He looked at was the Madonna
With a grassy green child in her arms.
When he looked at the curve
Of the earth he saw it.
He was in a wheelchair and on the verge
Of going. A poet, perhaps the next one,
Was pointed out to me. That was

The beginning of my obsession with garnets.
When I held them to the light
Their wine just changed.
I bought string after string, but the closest
I got was a hundred-year-old necklace
From the Netherlands. That was the age
Of charged jet and mourning jewellery.
I was determined to build back the thing
I had lost – given blessed to my
Mother, tucked into her lingerie drawer
And already forgotten, looped around
Its reliquary, filigree, empty.
We don’t know what it once
Held. A bit of fingernail, a curve of hair
Enormous parings, as of the moon.

She knew what was important.
She found garnets, once,
In a rock she had split open.
Black beyond black, in fact,
Blood red. My father removed
The pope’s blessing and replaced it
With his own. That might work
Better for you, he said. Black
Graphite lustre on beads of blood.
Those beads, I miss them
With my body. The reliquary
Hangs empty: a sacred heart.