[forwarded from James Nohrnberg]


This Laments Dead Angels, Its Their Monody and Fugue

tractas, et incendis per ignis / suppositos cineri doloso.
-- Horace, Odes, II.i, 7-8.

Weve sought them in the sleepless, unwearying
vigil of fires, under the smouldering rubble,
still charring in phantom flues, trapped in stairwells
choked with grit and personnel.  Armies of professionals,
staring down the embrous, fire-house throat,
confront laryngeal lava, and the general annhilation
of almost everything (writ geologically small)
to ash and dust.  The dead indeed subsist

just this side nothing -- loitering near
the gathering tarns that silver the mud of the pit,
scraping the clouded face of the skies
of the skies image.  They abide
on the ghostly Jacobs Ladder of rising
and falling body-counts, and continue to move
elevators and escalators, no longer
service stairs exclusively ours,
used beside theirs.

                        They are the angels
of the aftermath and mortuary,
who traveled last minute, with fiery seraphim
from a late mediaeval dream:
Let us die with the Philistines,
drinking their vodka
and spilling their petrol.

They lurk beside trashcan and ashpit,
by sealed files, in toasted dossiers
and powdered folders, or beneath a trampled hat:
they remain in accumulating piles,
in blinded cars and gutted vans, corpses of trucks
stripped of paint and glass and tires.

These are folk we need not see at all
to behold that they are there, inside the muck
and smoke and steam and mist and fire,
nearby the delicate silicon stars.

But we may not touch them,
they having come to disembodiment,
and floating in the elemental, abstract, dismantled,
no-more concrete.  They are in the doubled chimney
falling down itself.  The phone-calls from them.

-- Leafage rushed against a gutter,
garbage frozen on a giants dwarfish heel,
its impress hollowed out
upon the worlds citadel....  Conrads Greenwich
yet once more,
ground again to zero.

Birds slam into the plate-glass
of our sunroom; the TV screen repeatedly strikes
our paired Promethean matches
against those cozy vaults:  the evil Paracletes
oft-recounted vote, casting nay
gainst half a globe:  its vodka and petrol.

The angels of the dead persist:  in shreds and shards,
the ostraka tally of a terrible ledger.
They are now the property of...
-- of castaway cells, dilapidated chairs,
selfless autos, sofas with no future,
all furnishings and files repossessed
by the junkyard, beside the unofficial,
shifting street -- an eddying ditch of dump-trucks,
back alleys lined with bulletins and posters,
dismembered family photos, tacked once on cubicles,
now on staggered slabs of plasterboard,
slanting graveyard walls, crippled
parking-places, crushed strata and vertebrae.
Tornadoed and torpedoed, all by halves,
demolished to a chicken coop,
football fields vast.  The EXITs linger in the dark,
their fraud mercilessly exposed.

We shall only find them
between the plate techtonics,
avalanching past innocent paper-clips,
lightsome memo slips, unburied
sign-offs from the desk of.
                               --This is now my steel
and formica bier;  Im the taped and flattened snapshot
torn from your yearbook, album heavy once
with coffered covers, my quarter page
hidden with the angels in repeating wallpaper,
or the patterns in my ties and socks.
-- Our fragile stack of ceilings dropped
like a waiters bad mistake, on an order
to bomb the kitchen and the lobby;
weve replumbed the subway floor--
the pit and bottom rung
weve as suddenly become.

They balance on a precipice,
or settle near a drain,
relics that police or relatives
must list and conjure with:
cosmetic case initials,
shoe-size in a grate it caught,
credit-card array -- its badges fanning out
across the widening pool of personal effects.

-- Nestled in the twisted re-bar,
snarled like helixed ticker-tape, among debris
the Delft and crayon heavens weep:
the half-sunk, half-open briefcase
of a young trainee -- a thing that he or she
could no further need, nor any longer keep.
Yet that grounded laptop still extends
a broken song-sparrows fledgling wing,
oer-mired in the mounting price of crude.

-- This laments dead angels, its their monody and fugue.

                 (Sept.-Oct., 2001)