Peals of light
for the parishioners of St Augustine Roman Catholic Church
in Brooklyn, NY and Dalienne Majors, especially, who inspired this.
... Saturnalibus, optimo dierum ...
–Valerius Gaius Catullus
I heard the bells on Christmas day
–Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
For as long as we have feared
darkness and frigidity, spires
we erect have nosed upwards
we have stretched to reach to touch
the celestial concert of bodies,
ambulant and fixed, whether
arrayed in borrowed light
or radiating with interior fire.
galaxies dispense the luxury
that light is, borne
on waves as it traverses
space and time that we might be
carried away with ourselves,
our senses all fullness, as we behold
and are moved to return
the favor, courtesy of
the choreography
of fingers on strings, we,
in our colossal ingenuity attach
to sound frameworks of our own
design, as with lips and
larynxes animated by muscle
and soul, we unleash
song all in the service of desire
gifts, reciprocal. We emulate
with half-lame gestures, insufficient
and diffuse, dissolving into
air like smoke
ascending from a goat
on an altar —
as if God were open
to flattery for we know
it's the thought that counts
out the measure, that calls
the tune, the pig-headed divine
within us as we hammer away
like clappers in crowns,
attempting scaled-down versions
of whatever meager quotient of
splendor we might
manage to render out of
love like that
which moved the God of Genesis
to cure his own loneliness.
On the fifth day of Christmas
my true love gave to me:
five golden rings of
truth, five haloes,
the five books of the Torah,
the five feet of the iambs of
bards, the five fingers of
the hand, five short-falling
senses by means of which we
exude, execute ornate
strategies and half-baked takes
on the glory of God — our own
walloping renditions of angels and saints;
whether drafted in ramous pains-
taking reticules of lead and vitrified
emeralds, ambers and burgundies,
or coaxed out of marble,
even the greatest of our puny
efforts do deliver
us out of our skins, move us
from our self-assigned spots.
The bones of our imperfect
artistry glow and a wondrous
argument rumbles within,
which comes to us on waves,
arriving like sound or light. How
proud are we of our ornery
Buonarroti, for example,
working day and night,
tethered like Sisyphus
to scaffolding he erected,
his arthritic piety
a functional machine
strapped to him to him like
a pair of iron wings, and he,
stuck in a dead heat:
longshot in a contest
between him and his better self.
In the end, neither won,
neither captured the perfect
likeness in perfect light.
But we prevailed or were
triumphant, and I like to think
God won too, that
when God looked
upon those completed works,
whether wrestled out of rock
or left in a lavish sprawl
across the broad vaulted
cappella that doubled
as a canvas, that God took
it all in, and