by Jeannette de Beauvoir
I hear people look up their exes
on Google. I have an ex, too:
it’s the convent I once called
my home. Then, the nuns
were hundreds strong
(not including those deployed
to bring God to continents
where he’d already lived for
millennia under different names)
But now they’re gone: the convent
a college dormitory, the chapel
a tourist attraction, the last two sisters
eschewing skirts and veils
for ill-fitting pantsuits—
I wonder where I’d be now if I had
stayed with them back then.
My parents, in those years, fought
whatever drew me to an interior
life. They gave me everything a girl
could want—I pirouetted my way
into adolescence at ballet classes,
jumped horses over fixed timber
fences and took home medals. They
gave me everything—
And still I wanted more.
I wanted sacrifice, and visions, and God,
and poetry and danger, and love.
I wanted to live life as if it mattered:
every breath, every moment so real
I could feel it in my teeth, feel it
in my bones
candles and prayer in the chapel
before the rest of the world
was awake; ancient melodies
on weathered stone, moments
of ecstasy—it was all I wanted.
The nuns gave me a veil and I
prayed I would never leave.
But of course I did.
I’m not complaining: I grieved
the convent as fiercely as I would later
grieve a divorce—the loss of vocation
left me empty. Even divorces
don’t affect your whole soul:
to reclaim life took everything I had.
Everything I dreamed, everything I believed:
to find a path forward, alone, through
a broken world, to live a life without
the convent’s certain clarity.
And still, sometimes… I wonder
what became of them all, the hundreds
of girls and women—where are they,
now there is no more predawn intimacy
with the Beyond? Do they scale mountains,
cure diseases, write symphonies? I don’t
know. I don’t have that vision. Only sacred
memories of a time magical, beloved—
and gone.
And so here I am…
Looking up my ex on Google.
Jeannette de Beauvoir is a poet and novelist who lives and works at Land’s End—Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in the Emerson Review, the Looking Glass Review, Avalon Literary Review, the Blue Collar Review, Sheepshead Review, Grande Dame Literary, The Raven’s Perch, the Adirondack Review, Perception, and the New England Review, among others; she was featured in WCAI’s Poetry Sunday, and is the recipient of the Mary Ballard Chapbook Prize and the Outermost Poetry Contest national award. You can find out more at jeannettedebeauvoir.com