The Virgin and the Pelican: A Lyric

Early evenings in that season—a season that felt like one long evening with different variations on the moon—I walked through back alleys to a church that kept its labyrinth well maintained and its doors unlocked. Inside, in the incense-threaded dark, the church had leaded glass depicting different saints in familiar ways—see how Lucy holds out her eyes on that golden plate, so Byzantine, offering them to our eyes, as if a challenge, as if to say, Look (she can no longer look), this is the work of empire. In the evening of the empire in which I find myself alive, twenty-first-century America, I find myself seeking out churches in the dark.

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