Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.
—Flannery O’Connor

Communion held the balance of her hours
between hard fact and harder metaphor,
Christ’s body no less living than her own,
though living couldn’t hurt him anymore.
She walked with metal crutches, limbs gone thin
from lack of use the sicker she became.
Her blood, unlike the wine the chalice bore,

was past all prayer, its cells immutable.
O Lord I am not worthy. Daily mass,
each echoing the last. But only say the word.
Her hair fell out in handfuls while the grass
above her grave-to-be, next to her father’s,
grew, was cut, and grew. Pain pressed on her,
retreated, pressed. The grace that made it pass

for long enough to let her write a little
in the morning meant she must be blessed,
meant each right word absolved her for the way
her life kept quiet what her work confessed:
No sin was more original than hers,
creating lives that couldn’t be redeemed
except in language only she possessed.