The Nun with the PhD

The most beautiful woman
I ever saw was a Dominican Sister.
Her face bright and eyes crystalline,
the colour of pale diamond.

In them I saw the sky.
When she adjusted her scarf
momentarily an apocalypse
of Titian orange.

Not that her hair streamed down
glorious. More a restraining
of weight, of bobby-pinned
kabōd, more a vanishing.

I wonder ten years later which is true.
“She was beautiful because she turned away.”
Or:
“Drawn by beauty she turns away.”

That moment in St John Lateran
remains, when in the middle of her address
the hand adjusted scarf
hinted at a torrent of orange hair.

No one could locate the inward blush
hovering at the upper edge of eros and agapē
at the non-displaced glory in your face,
It must have been in me.

kabōd is a Hebrew term meaning both “weight” or “glory” or “radiant light”