I had this really deep practice for a couple of months 
in the early, very dark, winter mornings.  

I would gaze at St. Clare for as long as I could, just looking, 
making contact with the painting on the screen, 

sometimes eye to eye, sometimes wandering,
because holding a person’s gaze is often difficult. 

I’d look instead at her mouth,  
her big tanned hands holding the big cat, 

the dark veil she wore that was a way in
if I only knew how it worked. 

I did a lot of beseeching too, that she teach me her virtues.
Like patience and kindness.  The art of holding

steady. We are all patterns shifting in Our Lady’s cloak,
I’d hear her say, night sky flashing its unreachable

systems of light and mass.  I’d hear the geese 
honking overhead in the dark; I’d hear the monks 

in the charnel grounds, Sister Death doing the descant
in high thin tones. Sometimes I’d think I was seeing 

the olive trees growing beside the monastery where,
a friar told me, the sisters had kept vigil over her body.

This was after the earthquake that did all that damage
to the church, and the sisters had to camp 

outside to keep St. Clare’s body company, 
because, in all those hundreds of years, they said,

she’d never been alone. Sometimes 
I’d mistake my tears for rain. Sometimes

I’d see petals where faces usually are. Or greenery. 
There’s a kind of mysticism that rushes all over itself to explain,

piling words on top of words on top of words
and only sometimes you get a glimpse of what might

be meant. And there’s the other kind
that winds itself down into silence because

what is there to say before all that sky?
My mornings in the dark were a little stone gate,

thick and cool and very old, that stood
between the two. I waited there listening.

I watched her face; she watched mine.
That was when both the old cats

were still alive, their little bodies lifting 
in time with the breath of us. That was

some time ago now, but I still feel it there
once and awhile, though Clare’s face has been

moved away into a folder that lives inside 
another folder, and the two old cats have died, 

and the claws of the two new ones 
make sharp, bright, excited rents in the day.

There’s some dispute over whether this picture is of Clare or a laywoman named Lady Jacoba who was a friend and patron of St Francis.