Character

The alchemists sweated to change lead to gold.
My sister turned diamond into glass.
With her friends she followed
step for step their schoolmate
of the charm bracelet, tiny silver heart
with glittering inset. Scuff on pavement,
flock of saddle shoes, and quick voices:
Monica’s the biggest liar in class.
Says she wears diamonds, but they’re only glass.
No jeweler could have proved them wrong,
no test for the veracity of objects.
That was the year of plastic x-ray glasses
buried in cereal boxes. The story went,
the CIA had tried to use this
to smuggle the real item to someone undercover,
but along the way there was a slipup.
That box found a place
on the assembly line, traveled
across country on train and delivery truck,
crate and wheeled cart, to the one shelf
where it waited anonymous with others.
It was the mother of a fifth grade boy
who bought it. Next day,
Sister Thomas Aquinas caught him
peering at her through the thick glass,
seeking a glimpse of nunnish underwear.
Into her desk drawer they went
to gather dust amidst the confiscated,
until the morning she took them out
and leaned from her window, gazing
at each child struggling up the steps
to the huge double front door,
and saw in another boy’s heart
the bleeding host prank-stolen
from its dimly lit swaying throne.
The host crimson but whole, the heart
around it turning black.
How the wafer had made its way
from the lining of the digestive tract
into the sealed and pulpy chamber of the heart
did not occur to anyone to ask.
(I got in trouble for making up this story.)
Hadn’t we learned the heart
is the seat of character, of deception?
Which was why we couldn’t watch
television, those actresses I loved
wth their pouting lips and dyed
platinum hair. They have no character,
we were told. False on the outside, false
within. The Sisters had a television
in their sitting room where during supper
they watched the news. I was sent there once
with a message in the middle of the day,
but it was empty, curtains drawn,
the looked-for Sister busy elsewhere.
I tiptoed across a polished floor
to drown in. On top of the set, reigned
St. Clare, Patroness of Television, luminous
in her thin coat of glowing paint, eyes downturned
as if waiting for something to hatch
from behind the bulbous screen under her
care. (It was a seventeenth-century Italian,
I’d learn later, who first cooked barium sulfate
with powdered coal, and spread his mixture
over the iron bar that shone for him
falsely that night: lapis solaris,
soon to coat religious statues
everywhere.) Oh, surfaces!
It’s the sad of the world who only love
the truth, love only the truth.
With my illicitly long fingernail
I scratched from St. Clare’s veil
one splinter of light. It tasted
just like nothing when I swallowed.
I know it still burns somewhere in my dark.