SHARON HOFFMANN is a writer based in Atlantic Beach, Florida. Publications include the Hooghly Review, New York Quarterly, Beloit Poetry Journal, Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives (Harvard University Press), Paddler Press, South Florida Poetry Journal, Letters, Wild Roof, Sho Poetry Journal, and other magazines. Awards include fellowships from Atlantic Center for the Arts and Florida’s Division of Cultural Affairs, three Pushcart nominations and a nomination for Best Spiritual Literature.

The Well-House

 That past week – the tag-end of winter, the first of spring –

we had come across the Forth Bridge on a pilgrimage,

visiting holy wells, points in an ancient geography,

Saint Mungo’s well, St. Margaret’s. We wanted

to share something sacred, something the Reformation

had not reduced to rubble. They’d been able

to cut down sacred groves, lay waste to chapels,

desecrate statues of saints, but water was indestructible.

Water flowed on, and folk went on worshipping it.

---

Not us, though, not really. We were

just pretenders, not truly pilgrims.

When our guide drove us out into the countryside,

we were disappointed that St. Mungo’s Well survived

only as a shallow basin, dank and stagnant.

We left no offering, not a silver coin, not a bent pin.

We didn’t perambulate three times sunwise.

We certainly didn’t pray. We dipped our fingers in,

but declined to take the slightest sip.

---

At Roslyn, we skipped Saint Matthew’s Well.

No longer young and fit, we weren’t

inclined to clamber down the gorge just to see

some rivulet seeping downslope to the Esk.

We did intend to drink at Saint Anthony’s,

but once again our age betrayed us. We struggled

halfway up Salisbury Crag, but the saint and his well

stayed out of reach. (Perhaps St. Mungo

had told St. Anthony about our disrespect.)

---

Staggering back to Holyrood Park, thirsty

and exhausted, we were grateful when our guide

produced an iron key to a massive door.

Behind it were steps that descended

to the well-house underground – Saint Triduana’s Aisle.

In the Dark Ages, fifteen centuries before our time,

a holy virgin had plucked her own eyes out

and sent them to the Pictish prince who’d praised them.

---

A thousand years on, James III had built a chapel here,

a hexagon with an altar and her relicts up above,

the well-house underneath. Thousands came,

hoping to be cured of blindness and diseases of the eye.

When the Reformation came, this practice was called

idolatry. An edict ordered that the building be utterly destroyed.

But underground, the well remained. Hidden, not gone.

---

Now in the shadows under the vaulted ceiling,

we saw her broken statue, piles of rubble, fragments

of window tracery, rib-stones from the upper vault.

The cistern slab covering the well had been dislodged,

leaving a narrow opening. We peered down

into the well-hole underneath, the water surface trembling but so far below.

---

I wanted to fall headlong into that delicious cold

and let it change me. I wanted to believe.

Something spoke to me, saying:

There is a river underneath the earth, only one,

and it rises up in every ancient well.

If you want to touch that river, a silver coin will not suffice.

I would have to lie flat on the stones, lean

my body down into the cistern,

and stretch my hand as deep as it would go.

---

I did pray then: “Triduana, saint and sister, help me to see.”

I reached for the water, and it rose to me.

Odysseus Three Sticks

After the suitors are dead, Odysseus

wants to uncomplicate himself.

Suppose he leaves Ithaca again,

reprises his voyage to the mainland,

once again a shapely oar on his shoulder.

---

Suppose he walks inland,

city after city after city until at last

another traveler falls in besides him

and asks why he’s carrying

that winnowing shovel around like that,

especially since the wheat harvest

has already passed. I imagine

he sticks his oar into the soil,

just as Tiresius once told him to,

and makes his sacrifices to Poseidon.

---

What now?

It’s winter and too cold to travel,

so even though he’s eager to go home

and start the soft old age

Athena promised him,

what’s another passing season

after so many years of wandering?

---

In the spring there’s a girl

with a wheat bun in the oven,

and then there’s a son.

Twenty more years pass and a grandson –

let’s call him Odysseus Three Sticks.

---

Eventually, Three Sticks is tired

of the winnowing shovel and his dusty choices:

hard wheat or soft, bearded or unbearded,

smooth or velvet, shocking and stacking,

worrying about winter rust and yields,

when to plant a nurse crop,

whether to leave a portion of the wheat for seed.

---

Suppose Three Sticks doesn’t want

to be wheat anymore –

he wants to be chaff, something

light enough for the wind to take

anywhere at all. One day

when the fields are nothing

but stubble, he sets out south

with a winnowing shovel on his shoulder.

---

He walks until the air is heavy with salt,

and another wayfarer joins him, laughing

at what he’s carrying. Captain,

the man says, that’s a funny looking oar

on your shoulder.

Are you looking for a ship?

---

Yes, says Odysseus, show me the ship.

Show me the wine-dark sea.

Making the Mystery

“It was not much that was wanted. To make no mysteries where nature has made none.”                   — Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh

Men,

say women.

What else can you expect?

Expecting no answer,

gesturing silently,

palms flat and empty.

---

Women,

say men.

Shaking the head twice,

whistling the W

like a blasphemous prayer.

---

The same lines

bracket our mouths

when we name each other:

all alike, all alike.

---

I dreamed one night

it was not God

who confounded our language:

satyr, mentor, magus, anima, witchwife, muse.

---

Together

we make the mystery.

We cannot bear it that our words might mean

what your words mean

and still mean

no.

---

We cannot bear it

that we might be the same

and still be

alone.