Fox Frazier-Foley

St. Valerie, Patroness of Unanswered Questions and Overcast Skies; Sometimes Conflated with St. Sylvia

On the third day, they began to worry.
On the third day, they made

flyers, phone calls,
found your body

in your car in the flood-
ruined field more than

an hour from your home.
Air had recently healed

the town you drove to, absorbing
the Susquehanna uncredited

where earth lay sodden, exhausted, still
scarred as a burst lung: unable

& now able, drying, to give you
its wasted space to hide & die.

We don’t say suicide. We say
unattended death. We are careful

not to say the October wind
is burning: we say tenuis sub

artus flama demanat. The city
you died in had, for that month,

cleaved to the song you kept etched
in your skin: All we can do is keep

breathing. As schools began to
surface from the river’s rapacious

embrace. As animals swept away
in the current were kept from the blurred

gazes of those who’d lost them
or left them to drown. We don’t say God

damned all of us. Or ask why. We say Dona nobis
pacem. Dona eis requiem, sempiternam.

We don’t talk about your great
tap root tattoo. We make Valerian

root tea to relax, ease our hearts
into your choice to die. We toughen

and tauten our lungs like leather
knowing: we’ll keep you, keep

kneeling, exhaling these litanies.

I could say narwhal nightjar

rune or horse or deer. I do.

I say these things & mean love

like everyone: I have my

ocean my albatross Fox my pink

and violet aurora. This is

not the point: whether pain

can be salved or if we

can be saved. I know God’s hand

opens for us. But sometimes

I can’t Look,

how I ignored the begging

dog, scraps of my meal

indifferent on the plate.

Sometimes I am a vial

of can’t. I don’t believe

in fearless. Show me your

whitest scar: I want to talk

to someone who knows

what makes the beast

the beast is that when

he opens his mouth, we lean in.