The Little Way

In Houston at your desk you draft: pyrolysis—

   to transfigure carbon with heat that burns

    without oxygen or fire. Altar serving as a girl 

in your white plain alb, you held the douter 

 

above the candle’s flame until black smoke 

    poured out. Therese of Lisieux, patron saint 

of your home church, once wrote: I say very simply 

 

Some days you read my bad poems, asking why

    the hell they seem so roundabout. So I will

    be straightforward: remember telling me 

about the Halloween when you dressed up 

 

as a cloistered nun & all day stayed silent,

    just to keep in character? I thought, Christ,

   we’re too Catholic for our own good, meaning

that our obedience takes its form 

 

physically: in silence, the stomach aches

    each day you woke with, anxious about school.

   Scrupulosity—you could not write, in terror 

of the wrong word. Still at your desk, you type:

 

Biochar. Remediation—the words

       you use to talk about your new-burnt soils,

    oil-cleansed, your experiments with plants. 

The only way to prove my love, writes Therese,

 

is by spreading flowers. & so each day

you tend your seeds & watch them sprout; you first

      measure the control, then the treatment groups. 

They are not blossoming. Not yet. Progress 

 

here, you write, is found in millimeters,

      the tiny changes we will make in time. 

   We try & try & try. Now, spread your char.

(To get to heaven, says the saint, I need not grow.)

 

Now, watch your furnace glow, halogen-mute.

     O Love. Writing now directly, I pray:

 may we, each day feasting on this black dust, 

like little flowers, germinate; or not.