A Box of Fingers

An icon of Saint Spyridon (center, front, identifiable by his shepherd’s hat) silencing Arius (right, with hands over his mouth) at the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 325 CE

“Mimics we wish we all were, and we are,

We lack a subject just, we lack a car”

—John Berryman, “The Enemies of the Angels”

The history of everything’s a total mess,

Which I was perhaps put on Earth to chronicle

In some manageable form. True, I know stories,

And the received version of everything’s a lie,

But as with Cassandra, what I reckon's decried.

Consider Attila the Hun, for the nonce:

A sweet-natured, bookish man, who loved knock-knock jokes

And nothing better than to curl up in his yurt

With the writings of Euripides, whose complete

Works he possessed in a fine edition, since lost

—his daughter Odda sold it to the Holy See,

Where the Vatican’s black-robed censors no-no'd it.

In Dalmatia, some sixty years or more ago,

At Split, the pied-à-terre of Diocletian,

The sole Roman emperor ever to step down

And take up gardening in place of homicide

—How proud he was of the mighty cabbages he grew!

I saw the mummied fingers of Saint Spyridon,

Defender at Nicaea of the Trinity

In a small glass-fronted antique reliquary,

Part of the saint’s right hand, with which he refuted

Arius at the ecumenical council

In 325 CE, proving that a single

Deity may well be divided into three

By combusting a potsherd to a trinity,

water, fire, and clay. Found in Rome, where it’d wandered,

the miraculous finger stall that I had viewed

was flown to Kerkyra in 1986,

God long being by then agreed homoousion,*

Spyridon His Cypriot patron of Corfu,

Through which island’s streets the saint’s uncorrupted corpse,

Escorted by high-hatted bishops, congregants,

And cruise-ship tourists, parades each Palm Sunday.

No, these were not the digits of the saint’s left hand,

Which Spyridon, false witness claims, concealed behind

His back, fingers crossed, when he made his triple pitch.

In Kerkyra, his slippers have regularly

To be renewed, worn out on Corfu’s ghost ramparts

Holding a phantom janissary horde at bay . . .

But alas, as with Cassandra,

You never will believe a word I say!

*From the koinē Greek ὁμοούσιος (homoousios), meaning “essentially the same, or consubstantial,” with reference to the elements of the Holy Trinity, as opposed to ὁμοιούσιος (homoiousios), meaning “similar, but not identical,” with Jesus subordinate to God the Father and the Holy Ghost. Critics pointed out that these terms differ only in a single letter—but that iota of difference shook and almost shattered Spyridon’s Byzantine world (ca. 270–348 CE).

N.B. This poem is not, of course, to be taken seriously either historically or theologically. But I did see those fingers back in 1965. And note also this interesting report: https://www.ranker.com/list/vatican-team-that-embalmed-saints-relics/stacy-pratt

Tuesday, June 24, 2025