She’s made from nothing: dust, prayer,

apple skins, and she asks to be buried

in the desert.

–

Our lady’s clothes are stiff with sand,

so she lets me remove them for cleaning,

one by one. Meanwhile, we talk.

–

Her necklace is first, pearls

turned brown from the wind. I fiddle with the clasp

until it breaks, pretend 

not to feel her skin on mine

cold like cream.

–

She says, I shouldn’t be saying this,

and her voice trails off like a shallow stream.

I rub the beads with my thumb until 

they shine, and then a little more,

and try not to look her in the eyes.

I say, what?

–

What she tells me goes missing

in the drone of a passing truck,

one headlight dim like a bad eye.

–

I ask her to repeat herself

and take off her shoes, soft and close-toed.

She says, it’s a sin of mine, jealousy,

but they buried everything holy

with him.

–

(Christ is some yards down the road,

the last of the sand

being pulled over his cruciform

like a woolen sheet.)

–

I nod — a nonbeliever,

or something like it, it is not

my place. Our four hands

unbutton her blue dress, slowly. 

We pull it off in silence,

and I push it into the basin

in, out, in again

–

until the clear water is speckled with earth

like a sky flecked with dying stars. I do not ask her

what heaven is like. I take her socks, 

and hang them to dry. I do not ask

–

why we are here, in the land 

of in-betweens, nor how the Father

has been, nor the sun, whose place has been taken

by a hollow and inauspicious crescent.

I do not ask

why she herself is so fragile, 

so vulnerable, why she doesn’t bid me

to wash her land-caked hair,

why I am here at all.

–

Whether it would be so unholy

to kiss her quiet lips, or to drive away

in a blind and broken-down car.

–

Instead, we let the dry air do as it will.

Her clothes, fluttering on the line,

bloom from dark to light,

and we do not exchange a word

as I dress her again.

–

When I have finished, 

she says, Bless you. She means,

Thank you. I do not say,

I love you.

–

She lies down in her Sunday best,

and I begin to push sand

until she is gone from the Earth again.