“I had to run away high, so I wouldn’t come home low…”

As a kid, I believed in the Jersey Devil. As an adult, I was surprised to spot him at the cathedral, but maybe I shouldn’t be. In our minds, most of us are rarely far from home.

GARDEN STATE LOVE SONG

Repent your flailing forkèd tail and brush
The wingbit crumbs, rewandring why you fled.
The must of menus nemdays made you flush
The tinct of Taylor ham, and wonder bred
A boldened kobold, who for lusher state
Regressed abroad to bask in devlish blight.
But now the mayfield double-garden-gate
That welked you wide, is barr’d. Thus ends your flight.
So must you bitter pandaemony sip,
And dine on lines of dower Greek alone?
“There is no road for you, there is no ship—”
Baloney. Lonely imps may yet atone
In vented verse: Old cauls, like murdrous birds,
Arise, as g’s fawl off the ends of words.

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“My words trickle down, from a wound that I have no intention to heal…”

When the earthquake shook the National Cathedral on August 23, this bat-like beastie was damaged by falling stone. He clearly isn’t thinking straight; jilted, he may yet lose his head.

THEODICY
(DRÓTTKVÆTT)

rote & firmly formal,
first among the versed, we
spake no revolt, spelt our
spensings sans offenses.
dare we spect how dear my
dignant lord rewards me?
knife-stook bashes neck, &
never! I vow [bowing].

The broke-necked gargoyle on August 26, shot from the parking lot with a zoom lens…

…and photographed intact last summer from the observation deck:

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“I need him now to meet me face to face…”

From April to June, a local thief took advantage of dawn twilight to help himself to flowers from private yards, community gardens, and the cathedral grounds. In mid-June, the police nabbed him, and although he wasn’t arrested, his crime spree withered—but not before a gargoyle on the north nave barked a bit of doggerel.

NOTEBOOK: FRAGMENTS FOR A FLOWER THIEF

They paced the plot for hours, as mothers would,
But understood: “His arms were full of flowers.”

* * *

CHORUS
  The cruelest month: a cusp’d cliché
  That pricks the wisp of guilty May
  And breeds the thief of blameless June.
   Summer, unsurprise us soon.

* * *

“In April it was lilacs.” (Listen how
she hates to blame the deer.) “Hydrangeas now!
Four times this spring.” (Of course it could be deer.)
My peonies at least were spared this year.

* * *

The Lilack speaketh late of early Love.
The bolder Peon prospereth a-red.
The Seede abundant unifies the Figge.
We love thee numb, O Koriandrum, come—
Fragaria, redeem the injur’d Maid.

* * *

“He sold us flowers first a year ago.
We called him—Shantih?” Shantih does not know.

* * *

We conquer by the weapons we desert.
By dawn the dogs will bound ahead to find
The efflorescent errand you resigned,
The arrow shafts unwagoned in the dirt.

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“Sie haben uns ein Denkmal gebaut…”

Known as “the administrator,” this gargoyle hangs just to the side of the cathedral’s west façade and grips a miniature of the façade of the school he faces. After all this time, he argues in admirably good faith.

FAÇADE

Behold the form: We found our faith in spires.
From balustrade to buttress, by design
We build upon the base of our desires.
The ape of human order we divine,
And carved creation lightly gives us praise.
On day and eve, proportion we impose:
The perfect sun sets perfectly ablaze
A thousand perfect petals on the rose;
An arch constrains the brunt of outward pride.
One hymn we hue: “Ennobling words are dear
In thee, all sacramental modes preside
In thee”
as from the fading close I hear
a thing to tempt us out of rite and rhyme,
a sole cicada singing out of time.

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“Way over yonder in the minor key…”

Sometimes a tiger mother makes more sound than sense, but obscurity is useful: It forces you to ask, “Will I understand this when I’m older, or is this nonsense?”

ST. JOHN’S EVE
(MIDSUMMER SONG)

When leaves that leach from every tree
Like bitten insects blight and curl,
The swollen moon may let you see
But once a goblin girl.

Be quick: The brindled moths detest
To stir the brack and shallow air
Of seeping June, where scinnhiws nest,
Yet you will find her there.

Their sodden boughs admit no strand
Of summer-wasted moon to stream
But one, but she must make her stand
Within her sallow beam.

She snuffs the muck, but scarcely finds
The spoor of misremembered things,
As “Love, O careless Love, my mind’s
Not right,” she sifts, she sings,

She scents, she turns—her eyes aflash
Like stars above a harrowed field
That starve their spark in cosmic ash,
Eternity revealed

In silver curls, inflamed with sweat,
In reckless lilies, late awoke;
Their withring stems she stoops to let
Enwreathe her, lest she choke,

While through the gloom, she stalks the word
That calls the rake of summer rain.
As some slight boy who nursed a bird
But set her wing in vain,

She raises high her plunder fair,
She offers up a secret thing,
She grounds her glyph in graceless air,
While wild around you ring

The beadling eyes that light abide
To see the perfect rind unfold,
To gnaw the hidden fast inside
That goblins long to hold—

Her eyes will rise; you cast yours down.
Before her sneer, betray no guile.
And to her grin, extend a frown;
In this, you whet her wile.

And if she riddles, answer straight;
And to her white, you echo black;
But when she fangs, embrace your fate,
And her, and bite her back.

Then run, as you must always run,
And learn what you will never learn,
And goblin glances roundly shun;
But let the memory burn.

Beyond the bramble, timbers blaze,
So join us as we rouse with song
The lazing dawn, and know our days
Will never be this long.

Let seven into fathoms fall,
Let three around the wake-fire whirl,
And let your summer scant recall
But once a goblin girl.

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“So, I’ll continue to continue to pretend…”

CANTERBURY BELLS
(GOOD FRIDAY)

Campanula may bow; they dare not bend,
Though shafts of sun seem ever more remote.
I do not think the rain will ever end.

You breed prosodic lilacs and pretend:
“The drocts of April / pairst us to the rote;
Campanula may bow / they dare not bend,”

But poems (even this one) condescend;
You still need your umbrella and your coat.
I do not think the rain will ever end.

“I’ll drown my books!” you cry. (Yes: God forfend
Your graveside vigil lack some pithy quote.)
“Campanula may bow; they dare not bend—”

It comes out wrong. But what did you intend?
You plucked your eyes for pearls, and dimly wrote:
“I do not think the reign will ever end.”

Oremus: What can sodden bells portend
When even you misdoubt one hopeful note?
Campanula may bow; they dare not bend.
I do not think the rain will ever end.

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“The rain water drips through a crack in the ceiling…”

Every day, tour groups at the National Cathedral strain to see the grotesque of a certain famously evil pop-culture character, but they never notice the charming raccoon with whom he shares a buttress gablet. On rainy days like today, the raccoon deals with this recurring slight as any sensible creature would: by translating Rilke. (The original German poem is here.)

RAINER MARIA RILKE: SOLITUDE

Solitude is like the rain.
Along toward evening, rising up again
it slips the sea above the farther plain
to heaven, where it always rains, then down
from heaven falls alone upon the town.

Then down it rains in hours queerly cast,
when alleys turn to face the looming day,
when bodies, finding nothing, have at last
from one another glumly turned away,
and when, in their despite, two lives must stay
and side by side in one shared bed repose:

then solitude into the rivers flows…

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“And the little wheel runs on faith…”

If you’ve ever owned a hamster, then you know how easily these creatures succumb to ontological and epistemological crises, especially when they look in a mirror. In this case, the mirror is Walters 71.170, a medieval artifact that also repays human scrutiny.

A HAMSTER CONSIDERS AN IVORY MIRROR COVER FROM MEDIEVAL FRANCE

Is this the wheel rabbanim learn
In serifed murmurs to discern
How beasts on every fourthwise spoke
Revolve by fours, but do not turn?

Is this the wheel the brahmin broke
When, himmel-eyed, she dared invoke
Her patient, wisdomed groom, then beamed
To bow her head for Roman stroke?

Is this the wheel a consul schemed
To wreathe with kaisers crudely dreamed
Who whirled their luckless lots away,
Yet leave one lady long esteemed?

Is this wheel the suras say
Was made of silver, not of clay,
And spelt like ash across the sky
To lift a grazing flock to pray?

Four beasts about the border fly;
Within, the aging never die.
For wheels in wheels I long to burn,
But which, the beast, the blest, am I?

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“Mais nous pouvons faire ce que nous voulons…”

This snake on the northwest tower has long creeped me out. It’s one thing to fulfill your nature; it’s quite another to chalk up every impulse to giddy antiquarianism.

APOLOGIA

Heo cwaeð: “Seo naedre bepaehte me ond ic aett.”
—Gen. 3:13 (British Library MS Cotton Claudius B.iv)

We rede the Saxons sympathised with snakes:
On broach and bract they turve and intertwine
But buckle when modernity awakes;
All laud the wyrm who weaves a wulfish vine.

In retsel-books and wrixled words we find
The Saxons, ever lacertine, bestirred
To grammar-craft, whose duple pronouns bind;
So sundered lives were woven with a word.

(A scene: Some god-forsook Northumbrish monk,
Emboldened by an asp to double think,
Professes wit and unk and unker-unk,
But shrinks from git and ink and inker-ink.)

Now I, who raveled precedent relate,
Propose that we be litchwise intertraced;
The wulf and adder gleam on plink and plait,
Yet no immortal lepus ever graced

The lapidated latch of art divine,
So spurn your sallow scrafe, forget the sun.
For you the relic, I the blessid shrine;
In wit and work alike, we two are one.

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“In my blue heaven, there’s a bottle of Pontchartrain…”

I’ve never known what alligators dream. Apparently, it’s simple: “Laissez les bons temps rouler.”

CANAL STREET

When George leans back and waives his wyrmbent blade,
When golden Joan rolls up her banns of war,
When late Ignatius lutes his last crusade,
When Roch counts no more crutches by the door,
Then daub our brow with dust—but not today,
As saints salaam to every passing king
And all our sins are snatched and strewn away
Like bright, beloved beads that slip their string.