The Lives of the Saints

Suzanne Paola

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780295982724
• eBook ISBN: 9780295806952
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The image of the rose winds through the book, symbol of eternity and transience, gravity and folly. We find it in the ghastly bloom of the atomic bomb, in the relic of St. Therese of Lisieux, in the wool of a cloned sheep. Its image glows silently under the Waste Isolation Projects of Yucca Mountain and New Mexico, in the U.S. Human Radiation Experiments, in the altars constructed at the schoolyard gate of the Columbine massacre. The poems -- witty, sly, sensitive, and immensely informed -- trace the spiritual inquiries of a series of linked personae adrift in bodies and a world made toxic by the residues of scientific experimentation. Paola's dramatic monologues begin and end with the same fictional narrator, a wry, cynical, cake-baking woman who, on learning of the atomic structure of all matter, begins a lifetime of questioning. At times blasphemous, at times poignant and humorous, these voices are never less than heartbreakingly human, and the words they utter chill with their honesty. The Lives of the Saints is a stark, wise, meticulously researched book by a writer whose reputation leaps forward with each publication.

Caterínatí

All the way to heaven is heaven.

—St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380)

Her followers were called Caterinati, or else the Beautiful Brigade.

Lily

When I say there was a normal world I stepped back into

I mean I could almost see the door:

a glass door, a doorknob of cold crystal,

a door swung wide by eating yellow cake.

(Not the fishing weights I once sewed in the hem

of my pants. Not the cup after

cup of water.) Once I walked through

I saw how absurd I’d been on the other side of it,

a loose wire in sweatpants, wingbones

jutting from my cheeks, my face wanting to fly off.

It astonishes me: there are so many normal people.

Without thinking much they put on their normal clothes

that serve as a warm introduction to one another.

And their fat furniture & humped

cars. They don’t

have to think about it they just

like the same things. The kind of TV

where people are moving bones with a light jelly on them

& they meet in restaurants & quip & eat. Or rather

they order steaks & half chickens, chew

one well-amplified bite, & laughingly go home.

That’s not real, my doctor says, but I watch

the real, offscreen tables of untouched meat.

About Catherine

“Always mostly immersed in the supernatural”

living survivor of a dead twin, her long hair

the blond of milkfat,

at twelve she takes her father the dyer’s scissors & flut flut flut

the fall scirocco’s a sneeze of hair—

Her mother takes her to a hot spring: she finds one

that’s 200° & bubbles holes in her skin.

Now that she’s mineral she’ll no longer eat.

Only God can marry me after this, she says, thinking God

takes what he gets, not choosy.

Then comes the three years in her little cell

at home, the mechanical

raising & lowering of her arm, its brief

whip-tentacle. Like she was

a gizmo, a 19^th-century

itinerant’s contraption,

the brass monkey’s arm

shoveling its throat with coin.

Madame M.

The hair shirt. The spiked girdle & the iron chain.

Herself dom

& sub, fantasy & fulfillment.

We call ourselves players & in the animal world

play is always a predatory act. Who leads, who

feeds? The one who gives pain

knows precisely what to give, the one who takes

plays the minor chords of his body as he wants to.

He will call me Mistress a word that is power & powerlessness like saint.

I have a den with an oak Magnavox I lock away

& then I throw open a cupboard & call it

dungeon. It’s always

the powerful men who want this, & they’re exact.

Losing control the way an architect dynamites

a building, so it falls

this way. In dog collar, nipple clamp, cuffs & rope

like each piece of what you are must be separately stopped.

Lily

She chewed & chewed lettuce & celery then spat them out.

Tickled her throat

with a feather, saying

Let’s bring the miserable sinners up for judgment. (I

had no arguments, or nothing could have made me eat.)

Wore the Dominican habit & stayed at home

in a nine-foot cell, with her prayers & her beatings, a willed

& shuddering singularity. She sculpted her body down

to the real woman: I always felt

five pounds away from myself.

I remember the deaths of the Kennedys & a woman

named Jeane: she predicted them, & then

blithered on through the next thirty years—

World War III, Russia beating us to the moon.

Cosmic peace & harmony, all

before 2000. Everything & everyone in history

will be right once or twice, like a

stopped clock. & then go lunatic.

Madame M.

I love to garden. No one

believes this. I joke: my plants are black & blue,

& bloodred of course . . .

Not true. I like columbines & cosmos, all the pastelly shades

of innards if you washed them in a sink of milk.

Not roses, with their thorns & rust.

I joke: they’re the dominants

of the garden, I won’t have competition.

Wrong, they’re subs, in control

thr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• The Lives of the Saints
• The First Letter of St. Paul to the Clones
• Blessed Ludovica Albertoni
• The Second Letter of St. Paul on the Human Genome Project
• Patient 6
• The First Letter of St. Paul to the Columbines
• Caterinati
• The Third Letter of St. Paul at the Playground
• The Lives of the Saints II: Rosette
• The First Letter of St. Paul in the Homogocene
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• A Note on the Type