Again, the plague season returns. Again, horses live, and they die. Locusts descend, devour, disperse. All ashes. I watch you in the fields, drifting in and out of hinterland mists. A brindle foal learns to stand. Three times during my second pregnancy, we thought we lost our son—once in Gettysburg’s bee-buzzed peach orchard. How does love fill all our losses? If we’re silent, still the stones will ring. Mater dolorosa, you never ask why I don’t stop talking about suffering. You know darkness ripens darkness. We wear the Black Scapular as a history of your seven sorrows. Each dagger a flaring immensity through your heart, a kind of fanged animal. And yet you are so human: Losing your child in the temple. My fountain. Meeting him on the way to Calvary. My fawn. His agony as he hung beneath an eclipsed sky. My shepherd. Watching a soldier strike a spear into his heart after he died. Mother Mary, I watch you hold your lacerated son, as I wait among your feathery lumen. We talk of paradise. Your mortal body transfiguring to shining immortal woman. We talk of love. I remove my body like a cloak and rise.