Where the south nave meets the south transept, near the entrance to the gift shop, is this fellow. As gargoyles go, he’s not lurid or menacing, but he does know his role in architectural tradition.

FEBRUARY 14

“On a skull in Salamanca
High within a grand façade
Croaking notes of grace eternal
Roosts a rana loved by God.”

So the tourist told his lover
Smiling up through falling snow.
“Strange,” she said, “sounds Salamanca.
What bright boon do frogs bestow?”

“Should two souls in Salamanca
Chance to see the frog,” he said,
“Blessed days are bound to follow;
In a year, the two will wed.”

Glancing down, she glimpsed a garden;
Frozen roses felt her sigh:
“We are not in Salamanca.”
Windy whipped the winter sky.

Side by side, the silent strangers
Shuffling slowly through the snow
Spoke no more of Salamanca;
Where they went, I do not know.

(For all the entries in this series, hit the “looking up” tag.)

The little satyr outside the cathedral’s herb cottage patiently pipes his silent tune regardless of the season. He’s not a gargoyle, but why hold that against him? When he heard we’re getting more snow on top of the two feet that fell on the city last weekend, he took it personally.

SAUDADE

I pipe under protest, knowing no blizzard will trouble to tell me
Why I was banished, a fantasy long since forgotten.
Older eyes see an Arcadian prelude, when straw-skirted shepherd girls
Swooned at my lyrics, eternally light-eyed and lewd…
One day, the sun shone down drowsy. I curled upon emeraldine moss-root,
Dozing insensate, for nothing that dreams is immortal.
Stretching, I stirred—and I gasped at the winter that rose all around me:
Blinding white pastures and hillsides and frost-shrouded peaks.
Heartsick, I shook—and then Zephyrus whispered, so hyacinth-sweet,
Dissolving the winter; the world was a fresh, flawless green.
Snow turned to cloudbursts, all wet-nosed and panting. They pressed for a melody,
Cheerful but soothing, as pale and as patient as peonies.
Storm-god, I’m hardly as young as I look. Your rage to benumb me
Kindles a memory: waking to sheep in the spring.

(For all the entries in this series, hit the “looking up” tag.)

Few visitors to the National Cathedral glance up to see who’s perched on the facade just north of Creation. What follows is unreliable; the snowstorm, and my interlocutor’s ancient Greek accent, made accurate transcription rather difficult.

PAN

Leave “kyrie” and “tirra lirra” be,
And let me sneer and jeer and leer at thee.
The gates of dawn are bricked and bolted fast;
The springs of piping pastors fell at last.
Now winter twists my reeds like broken wings,
And Philomel abhors the hymn she sings,
Yet all the world adjudges me the thief?
Perhaps I am. So peep behind my leaf,
And spurn what sailors swore in days of old;
I am not dead, dear Thamus—simply cold.

(Above: Pan on February 6, 2010. Below: Pan on December 3, 2009.)

(For all the entries in this series, hit the “looking up” tag.)

The rodent poised on a buttress on the south nave of the National Cathedral didn’t go where I expected—but that, I suppose, is the point.

DIE FLEDERMAUS

You say: “No mouse was meant to fly.”
I woke with wings, so why
Should I not try

To streak and swoop from roof to peak,
Refining my technique?
Perhaps next week,

You’ll dwindle as I soar aloft,
You sorry souls who scoffed,
And, landing soft

In straunge strondes, I alight
A pilgrim benedight;
But then, by night,

The leatherwings my roost surround
With prophecies profound;
Without a sound

They flap from crags and belfries cold
A bat-king to behold.
So would you scold

A faulty mouse whom Fortune spurned,
Whose rote she left unturned?
For I have learned

A larger life demands a leap.
When all the world’s asleep,
From spiry steep

I’ll wing where mice may safely twitch:
Moel Hebog will bewitch,
And Lovćen’s rich,

And Eldfell smolders, bare and bleak—
Perhaps a perfect peak
Where all who squeak

May lightly laze, like long-shed sorrow:
Fuji, Kilimanjaro
…so, tomorrow.

(For all the entries in this series, hit the “looking up” tag.)

The dour bishop on the south nave of the National Cathedral needs to spend less time judging tourists and more time reading the Cura Pastoralis. Does anyone understand what he’s yammering about? I don’t.

ORDINARY TIME

When January thaws, and spirits fall
Like late December sleet that spattered all
These roots and stumps, you stumble, overwrought,
The virtue in your veins engendering nought
But wheezing as you clamber to repeat
This uninspired ritual: to greet
Another crop of claimants at the source,
In chapels where this custom runs its course
And small fools hum a hymn for Heaven’s sake
(Which only keeps the bigger fools awake),
Then something pricks your wan and warbling heart;
To compensate, you contemplate the art
Of forming crooked cloisters with your hands;
Below, the palmers sneak from sundry lands
And cross the lines of tales that didn’t end.
Along the leaves of centuries, they wend
To seek a saint. His holy, blissful trick?
He once helped others when that they were sick.
And here your daydream fails. In disarray,
You pace the nave alone. You sulk away.
You haunt the darkened pub, and down a beer,
And swish the foamy dregs, another year.
Vocations call for patience, this you know;
Devout or not, your pilgrims never show.

(For all the entries in this series, hit the “looking up” tag.)

Gasch’s Guide to Gargoyles and Other Grotesques says that this bone-clutching critter on the north nave of the National Cathedral is a basenji, an African dog that can’t bark but does tend to yodel. Our neighborhood basenji earned his place in the 1959-1960 gargoyle design competition; his artist, as you’ll see, is already the subject of apocrypha.

EPIPHANY

Bereft of bark, I bat my bone about,
And do my simple service as a spout,
And in my mind I romp across the grass
And nip at skirt-clad ankles as they pass,
And let no lofty insight cloud my brain;
Discernment falls and drips away, like rain.
…but once, a sunny pilgrim made me think:
Her left hand clutched a sketch-pad sopped with ink,
Her right hand led her son—and in my spine,
I knew those hands determined my design.
That sprinkler-misty morning, I awoke
And listened to my maker as she spoke:
“Imagine: When a thousand years have flown,
We’ll look up and see this pup-spout of our own.”
The boy stepped back suspiciously and said,
“I hope by then we’re looking down instead.”

(For all the entries in this series, hit the “looking up” tag.)

Having spent years watching Washingtonians pass beneath him, the elephant on the west facade of the National Cathedral has lost all patience for us. While the old line about elephants never forgetting is generally true, it’s just as true that elephants don’t remember what they’ve read in ways that we smaller-brained creatures would consider logical. As such, this discontented bibliophile sees the city through his own singleminded filter. You know how elephants are.

UBI SUNT QUI ANTE NOS CONCULCAVERUNT?

Send for some plaid piper; let him march the mice away:
Staffers squeak and scatter into fifty shades of gray.
No heroes hold the hilltop hall, nearby presides a fool;
Let Shanthi and Kandula and Ambika romp and rule!
Come, my trunk-faced children! Stomp from Carthage to the Alps.
Make the Romans quaver from their sandals to their scalps!
Send for Ethiopians, with war-mounts wont to kneel
By the walls of war-torn Mecca, and watch Abrahama reel.
Send for Greeks where tesserae wash up along the strand;
Find tuskers in the market tracing crosses in the sand.
Send riders out to Roncesvalles; let Roland raise his horn!
Bring Isaac and Abul Abaz from Baghdad’s bangled bourn.
Send for steeds from Siam, where we didn’t yield an inch!
Send for Blair in Burma (though he’ll shoot you in a pinch),
And Wallinger and Buckingham and one who hears a (who?)
And Jumbo (how?) and Jim Crow (what?) and Samwise Gamgee too.
Send for (ah!) Ganesha on a ten- or twelve-arm day!
Let trunks transform to trumpets, blow bureaucracy away,
And laugh as legends leap and lunge and light up dull D.C.!
(And if, at last, nobody comes, then maybe send for me.)

(The blogger apologizes to Langston Hughes. The elephant, of course, apologizes to no one.)

(For all the entries in this series, hit the “looking up” tag.)

Just above the wild boar on the south nave of Washington National Cathedral are several smaller gargoyles and grotesques. Without binoculars or a zoomable camera, you might easily stroll by without ever noticing them, but it’s worth stopping in front of the garden and looking up. The most interesting critters aren’t about to clamber down to you, however much some of them may in fact desire to do so.

AN OCTOPUS REAPPRAISES HER LOBSTER

I hear the hot breath of the lobster I love;
The trees wilt below us; there’s nothing above.
You snore and I shudder, for sleepless I know
The oath of adventure we swore long ago:

“Between us, our limbs number eighteen in all;
Let’s creep from this tank and slip over the wall
And forever be free! Let’s aspire to perch
On a spire of our own on the loftiest church.”

You clawed at my tentacle, tender and green,
Like the first awkward kiss of a king and his queen.
You scuttled, I swam; through the garden we went.
Where grass gripped the stones, we began our ascent.

A lobster lives long, as no octopus can,
But a lobster has in him but one perfect plan.
I longed for longevity; no girl expects
To ask of her lobster, “So what happens next?”

You curl up contentedly, dreaming of me;
I cling to my cornice and scarcely feel free.
“I won’t let you down,” you once vowed, and I sighed.
I love that you’re honest; I wish you had lied.

(For all the entries in this series, hit the “looking up” tag.)

Washington National Cathedral is known for its quirky gargoyles, but recently my friends’ five-year-old spotted a relatively mundane beastie around 35 feet up, wedged among the dragons and monsters that overlook the Bishop’s Garden. I imagine this creature must think rather highly of himself. And so I give you…

A SONNET FROM THE BOARTUGUESE

I ask: Did He who made the squirrel make me?
He shaped the petty weevil, slug, and fly:
For as thou art to them, am I to thee,
When ’round the garden durst thou slouch and sigh.
I grin, and father pestilence on high;
I bristle, and beshrivel every leaf;
I twitch an ear, the goldfish gasp and die;
I blink, and roses beg for sweet relief.
Yet tourist, when thou turnst to tend thy grief,
My holy tusks and tail thou shan’t recall,
Though still I mince thy mind with unbelief;
Between these buttressed groves I govern all.
Let dragons thus proclaim in wyrmish lore:
“Among our roosts there ruled a humble boar.”

(For all the entries in this series, hit the “looking up” tag.)