The Relics of Eulalia

A hundred men bear one girl’s bones
to catacombs. In her sarcophagus,
loose legs clink against a halfling pelvis,
pebble hard. Through cobbled tributaries,
bearers flow along a riverbed last lapped
by her red waters. Their alabaster cage
rides high and light on sea grass finger tips–
gleam of bone wafts through murk of dawn.
How each man aches to have a piece of her.
Hard bits gift the best kind of forgetting:
No more a knuckle but a worry stone,
marble light and smooth, to be rubbed raw
in the deep pockets of the pious, so many
boys with un-remembering eyes.