By Ann Conrad Lammers
You took Adeodatus to your baptism (I almost wrote:
your funeral). The boy came later
and told me how it was. I hardly listened.
I wanted only, then as now,
to meet you once on level ground
and hear from your mouth the sound of my name.
You could drown my name in silence
but not silence it in your mind.
I am in the pages of your writing:
Eve, Lilith, the daughters of men.
I am the slave on account of sin,
the flesh that weighs down wisdom,
the image that deceives, the vessel
that catches and holds captive. In me
you beat down your unruly flesh.
From a boy passionate with love and clarity
I watched you change into a driven man
who broke himself in two. Everything
for you is now split halves: Charity
is founded on rejection, sainthood on divorce.
Other men choose the downward path
away from the mother’s heaven, toward
a holiness woven in the flesh. Those men grow up.
They face their opposites and know themselves,
and suffer what they cannot know.
I wish I had confronted you when I could,
as wives confront their husbands, but then
you never let me come so close. Philosophy
protected you, then your rank, and finally your mother.
Monica—the virgin mother and the heavenly city!
You turned to gaze with her into eternal space.
For you, holiness is Monica and her son, like the two
natures of Christ, united without showing how.
Since I am banished from that mystery
I will go elsewhere. You cannot unmake me by theology.
Aurelius, your mistress and the world are standing
outside closed church-doors excommunicate.
The story of our parting has two sides.
I wonder if Aurelius is still alive.
Source: Feminist Interpretations of Augustine, ed. Judith Chelius Stark (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 301–2.