Stone Angels Angels go - we* Merely stray, image of A wandering deity, searching for Wells or for work. They scale Rungs of air, ascending And descending - we are a little Lower. The grass covers us.
But statues, here, they stand, simple as Horizon. Statements, Yes - but what they stand for Is long fallen.
Angels of memory: they point To the death of time, not Themselves timeless, and without Recall. Their Strength is to stand Still, afterglow Of an old religion.
One can imagine them sentient - that is to say, we may attribute to stone-hardness, one after the other, our own five senses, until it spring to life and breathe and sneeze and step down among us.
But in fact, they are the opposite of perception: we bury our gaze in them. For all my sympathy, I suppose they see nothing at all, eyeless to indicate our calamity, breathless and graceful above the ruins they inspire.
I could close my eyes now and evade, maybe, the blind fear that their wings hold.
The visible body expresses our body as a whole, its internal asymmetries, and also the broken symmetry we wander through.
With practice I might regard people and things - the field around me - as blots: objects for fantasy, shadowy but legible. All these words have other meanings. A little written may be far too much to read.
A while and a while and a while, after a while make something like forever.
From ontological bric-a-brac, and without knowing quite what they mean, I select my four ambassadors: my double, my shadow, my shining covering, my name.
The graven names are not their names, but ours.
Expectation, endlessly engraved, is a question to beg. Blemishes on exposed surfaces - perpetual corrosion - enliven features fastened to the stone.
Expecting nothing without struggle, I come to expect nothing but struggle.
The primal Adam, our archetype - light at his back, heavy substance below him - glanced down into uncertain depths, fell in love with and fell into his own shadow.
Legend or history: footprints of passing events. Lord how our information increaseth.
I see only a surface - complex enough, its interruptions of deep blue - suggesting that the earth is hollow, stretched around what must be all the rest.
My 'world' is parsimoniuos - a few elements which
combine, like tricks of light, to sketch the barest outline. But my void is lavish, breaking its frame, tempting me always to turn again, again, for each glimpse suggests more and more in some other, farther emptiness.
To reach empty space, think away each object - without destroying its position. Ghostly then, with contents gone, the vacuum will not, as you might expect, collapse, but hang there, vacant, waiting an inrush of reappointments seven times worse than anything you know, seven other dimensions curled into our three.
But time empties, on occasion, more quickly than that. Breathe in our out. No motion moves.
Trees go down, random and planted, the way we think.
The sacrificial animal is consumed by fire, ascends in greasy smoke, an offering to the sky. Earthly refuse assaults heaven, as we are contaminated by notions of eternity. It is as if a love letter - or everything I have written - were to be torn up and the pieces scattered, in order to reach the beloved.
No entrance after sundown. Under how vast a night, what we call day.
What stands still is merely extended - what moves is in space.
Immobile figures, here in a race with death gloom about their heads like a dark nimbus.
Still, they do - while standing - go: they've a motion like the flow of water, like ice, only slower. Our time is a river, theirs the glassy sea.
They drift, as we do, in this garden so swank, so grandly indiscriminate. Frail wings, fingers too fragile. Their faces freckle, weathering.
Pure spirit, saith the Angelic Doctor. But not these angels: pure visibility, hovering, lifting horror into the day, to cancel and preserve it.
The worst death, worse than death, would be to die, leaving nothing unfinished.
Somewhere in my life, there must have been - buried now under long accumulation - some extreme joy which, never spoken, cannot be brought to mind. How else, in this unconscious city, could I have such a sense of dwelling?
I would raise . . . What's the opposite of Ebenezer?
Night, with its crypt, its cradlesong. Rage for day's end: impatience, like a boat in the evening. Toward the horizon, as down a sounding line. Barcarolle, funeral march.