Gary Fincke: “Ash Wednesday”
ASH WEDNESDAY
Despite the snow, your mother insists
that the neighborhood is feverish,
running a temperature raised by the mill.
Your house keeps gathering a film
of filth, jaundiced by the industrial air.
The city bus drops the disappointed
off at the end of the street. Because
sidewalks live somewhere else, plows
a total stranger, all of them follow
the furrows left in the snow by tires,
open doors and vanish into light.
Lent has returned, Wednesday evenings,
non-negotiable, sentenced to sermons
and communion and lost television.
Earlier, the next-door Catholic girl
had been spotted with ashes by a priest,
her forehead a neglected windowsill.
Last summer, thirteen, from your room’s
upstairs window, the pane so small
it could be called a keyhole, you stared
and stared over the hedge of hollyhocks.
All winter she has entered and exited
the cars of junior and senior boys.
Now, she is explaining how even
thoughts can be synonyms for sins
both venial and mortal. “Yours, too,”
she says, and though you have never
been taught to distinguish, you think
of how, lately, you wake each day to lust
and anger in a body mortgaged
to obedience, the usury demanded
by faith so outrageous that you are
unable to pay down that debt, certain,
in turn, that you wish to be as alone
with her as her hidden priest, alert
for her soft, explicit confession.
Gary Fincke has a new collection of poems, For Now, We Have Been Spared, scheduled for publication by Slant Books in late 2024.