Guanacos

At St. Catherine's

Master had a bowling ball in his throat.

A heavy fog drifted around our desks,

in our hair,

everywhere.

Ship's horns blew.

Some drowned.

I still can't identify the hypotenuse of a right triangle

or the bodies of the girls who turned to pussy-willows

during the long afternoons.

At night at St. Catherine's

I was in love with a girl who was not in love with me.

She spent her evenings stitching the windows closed,

while I fell in and out of clouds

like a blackbird in a storm in a book in my head.

St. Catherine's became a sea port,

then an art gallery,

then a candle wax manufactory.

It groaned under heavy currents,

the bricks ran in the rain,

then it caught fire and drifted into the harbor.

After St. Catherine's,

the girl who was not in love with me died

when her skirts became sails and sank 

somewhere off South America.

The guanacos  came down to eat her jewelry from her ears and fingers.

Then it rained but never touched the ground.

St Catherine's girls' choir

saved itself under my skin.

In the silent hours when my new love turns like stirred batter in my arms,

I can hear Handel.

Then I am alone except for the guanacos with their sorrowful eyes

who graze on the lichen in my palm, around my heart, and in this poem.

__________________________

Process note, courtesy of Wikipedia:
Some guanacos live in the Atacama Desert, where in some areas it has not rained for over 50 years. A mountainous coastline running parallel to the desert enables them to survive in what are called "fog oases" or lomas. Where the cool water touches the hotter land, the air above the desert is cooled, creating a fog and thus, water vapor. Winds carry the fog across the desert, where cacti catch the water droplets and lichens that cling to the cacti soak it in like a sponge. Guanacos then eat the cacti flowers and the lichens.

And: 
St. Catherine's Taffy is a candy made by girls in Quebec to honour St. Catherine, the patron saint of unmarried women on her feast day, November 25.^[1] St. Catherine's day is sometimes known in Quebec as "taffy day," a day when marriage-age girls would make taffy for eligible boys. Marguerite Bourgeoys, a founder of the Notre-Dame de Montréal and an early teacher at Ville-Marie, the colonial settlement that would later become Montreal is credited with starting the tradition as a way of keeping the attention of her young students.