Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

Christopher Ankney
Churches
Kutna Horá, Czech Republic, July, 2005
We tour the bone church, first, as the sun breaks
out of its earthly grave. The sanctuary named
after a medievalist who stripped plague victims
to their indecent whites and decorated sacred
with his artistic fetish. A half-blind Cistercian
monk used the newborn church as his palette;
the walls clean as light, he rummaged the cemetery
for supplies, antique bones washed of flesh:
a yard fertile long before the church, the ground
a pilgrimage for death, we are told: an abbot sprinkled
earth from Golgotha unto his land, and soon
the plots grew into religious fashion. The craze
of late fourteenth century. I walk the moss-rugged
burial path as Matt, a near seven-foot man, dangles
his spidery legs over the wall, having taken a piss
on its other side, his back to a playground slide.
I repeat how the church was erected after the rolling
death counts, in the heart of headstones: what was quarried
for the foundation was mixed like a bucket of chicken
with fresh refugee bones; sculpted into pinnacles, monstrances.
For the first time I light a candle in church, donate
money, stare up at the chandelier, deadened, and count
all two hundred and six bones in the human body.
Our next place of worship, in the hazy afternoon,
is gated. Its original fence circles the hill, is holding
better than the wall-scaling snails, their shells
hollowed by light hitting the open land. Only a fist
of people fit inside to see the never-used tomb
upfront in a barren room. Outside
two sweat bees rest stiffly on their backs in yellow
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