The Saint of Missing Things

Saint ______,

whose face was forgotten while the paint was still wet.

I see that a key hangs from your left hand,
even though its lock disappeared before Lent.

In your right, one milk tooth,
a hotel Bible swollen with rain,
three minutes from October 1989,
and the blue cup my mother broke
before I was born.

In fact, they say you hold onto everything
in a place without directions.

You recall the cough erased from the recording,
the fourth stair from a demolished house,
a dog's last dream.
The other name considered for me
but swallowed whole before I was baptised.

Saint ______,

I have misplaced an entire afternoon.

It was warm,
and someone was frying onions downstairs,
while television murmured through the wall.

Please return the small red chair
from the room on ______ Street.

Return the mole from the shoulder
of ______.

Bring back Tuesday,

and bring back the six inches of air
between my grandmother's hand
and the telephone
when it rang that night.

You may keep the telephone.

Saint ______,

patron of dropped stitches,
extinct smells, misheard instructions,
unborn sisters, and the soft machinery
that carries a person out of a room
after everyone else has gone home.

Last night I put bread on the sill
as the old women instructed.

By morning, five small bites
had appeared along the crust,

but the marks belonged
to a mouth I couldn't picture.

I ate it anyway.

Please forgive me.

There are so few sacraments left
that still taste like anything.

Saint ______,

if you find the hour
appointed for my death,

please lose it again.

If you find the god
who lived behind the wallpaper
and sang me lullabies when I was six,

ask whether ______ remembers me.

If you find my original face,

bury it under the kitchen tiles in the eastern corner.

And if somewhere
in that impossible inventory
you come across me?

The whole one, the first one,
the one who existed before my name
learned to turn its head.

Please put me back

exactly where

you found me.