Spirit is issued in the liver
where heat intensifies to strike
lightning through the veins
 
where the flash becomes virtue
and flows to every limb.
It soaks the chambers in the brain,
 
bubbles through dens in the heart
and carries reason
to its home in the brow.
 
Logic is a burn mark
left by the spirit speeding
between walls in the skull, while memory
 
is heat subsiding
and turning into lichen
along the mind’s cool slopes.
                        

On the windswept rise
where Hildegard watches dawn
 
an adder slips beside her
like Adam’s melting rib. She strokes
 
then gives it back
to the world beneath the soil. The sky
 
is purple as the early gale
leaps over hills and grips
 
the limbs of a tree whose leaves
ring against each other, sparkling
 
in the velvet light
while all the Earth is howling.
 
From the tree, Hildegard
hears a voice. When bark
 
falls away, the Virgin steps forward
and smiles
 
as she wipes a kiss of poison from her mouth.
                        

An Italian messenger has crossed the Alps
carrying a scroll of news
from all the convents in the order. Hildegard
thinks his home is close
 
to the end of all mountains
where the messenger can see
almost to the lowest rung of Heaven.
This world
 
curls up at its edges, holding
seas back from infinity, she claims, and we
float in a sphere we cannot see.
The sphere in turn
 
is floating in an oval space
which fits inside
another, still another layer
away from the stars. This is a skin
 
of fire turning blue. As the messenger reads
a list of the departed, Hildegard
imagines their journeys; their bodies
growing light as the spirit
 
steps out of them
to climb invisible ladders
from universe to universe.