transubstantiate

(January, pine boughs fall from the weight of snow in a soft, huffing collapse: “objects are portions of arrested happening” —George Kubler)

My father saved the cookies from her last Christmas in a desk drawer, hoarding them as if to keep her whole: sugar-frosted crimson wreaths dotted with metallic silver candy orbs but even so fading to pink. I wonder if he fed on them as if they were the consecrated host, fruit of the fields, the work of human hands. In any case he did them better service than the rest of us who, discovering them in the drawer after his death, lacquered them and preserved them as fetish ornaments.

We have lost our religion. Somewhere I have a crumpled ball of paper napkin containing shards of bread crust and a dust of cheese swept up from a table in embarrassment and entombed there. The paper is quite grey by now but the contents are surprisingly fresh. They cling to the fingertip if you touch them and have to be brushed off, like dander. I wonder what they would taste like.

When we were children we knew the system of relics. First class was bone, hair or other body part of a saint or virgin; second class the cloak or handkerchief; third class was something the holy one had touched.

“Hair, body hair, nails, teeth, skin; skin, teeth, nails, body hair, hair. They can also be meditated upon as dead, for all the outsides and the ends of these five parts are dead, so that what gives rise to pride in our own body or lust for that of others is dead.” Bhikku Khantipalo

Nos habebit humus.
Nos habebit humus.