Two Poems by W.J.Herbert

Two Poems: W.J. Herbert

Looking for Grief’s Exit in the Glass A 250-ton Baroque sculpture, The Assumption of the Virgin dominates the high altar at Chartres Cathedral.

That last day, the metal scaffolding spread out like a catacomb of airy tunnels above ground, the workers’ voices caroling over her.

Hammers echoing a requiem. Drills tightening rivets to keep the structure up, winch lifting metal rods skyward. What are they doing up there behind the organ? she wonders, her binoculars blind to whatever the sun is trying to write in the sacred images of the windows, vibrations up and down the nave colliding inside the recesses of stone, as if she were in a subway tunnel, tracks rattling but no train, nothing but space and waiting, the incessant banging when a rivet sticks. She could be beneath Times Square then, she thinks, where the tracks overlap, tunnels diving deeper into the schist with the same desire to go somewhere: Brooklyn, the Bronx, Harlem fanning out in all directions, expresses easy to catch, gigantic Mary in marble not waiting for an uptown train, but floating down to the West Village, to Stonewall, the sky widening above Liberty’s torch, her door in the harbor’s din still invisible. One rock-bound French icon to the other, the statues wave, though Mary is older with both arms outstretched.

But isn’t it the same gesture? Dark descending in both hemispheres, time collapsing in the cathedral’s gloom, tomb-bound Mary saying as angels, still earthbound, pretend to lift her: I’m going. You come too, while Liberty, buffeted by salt-waves and rain, shifts in her copper skin and whispers: “This is our paradise.”

W.J. H E R BE RT

Our Lady of Chartres The bishop casts over his head then hers, mist from a holy implement but the organ’s chords clash, their dissonance a dispute over the existence of eternity, light in a dome of sky, the choir singing to a dozen elders wearing overcoats because the cathedral is so cold and, now, the little bells announce, what?— * A man in a trench coat speaking French into a microphone, his syllables so elongated that echoes obscure his words, then the call and response or . . . no, it’s just another hymn,

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while a boy nestled in his mother’s arms, head buried in her sweater begins to wiggle, as if he’s as distracted as she is. Has anyone told him who the whalesized figure carved in marble is supposed to be?— ship-wrecked stone, its waves rolling beneath a floating body whose arms beckon: the woman already dead, yet trying to rise from her tomb’s cloud -ship, angels shouldering the ethereal white and billowing stone of her body, as if lifting easily the impossible rock. Who would believe she could rise anywhere?

Yet her marble is lit

W.J. H E R BE RT

with incandescence and, welling up now in waves, the voice of the choir laps against it; their hymn, its own cloak and she feels her hands’ heat as the air of the cathedral takes on a green tint: * lichen’s tinge seeping into the priest’s cassock, his assistant’s robes no longer white but jade-like, lectern mossy.

Even the smoke coming out of the censor is emerald, but the glass of the gothic windows glows with the same disturbing red as yesterday when

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the light had been stingier, and she wonders why these greens have descended like a second eyelid, as if she is a serpent coiled in a choir stall biding its time, the bishop intoning ad infinitum; his vowels, a river of stones thrown from the microphone, as if he could drive the doubt out of her, but she knows what it means to be cold: her mother’s skin as unflinching as this marble, no more likely to rise than bubbles trapped * in glass. Dead is dead, she thinks and remembers how,

W.J. H E R BE RT

in the beginning, we didn’t wear masks because we didn’t understand the nature of the invisible particles one person can pass to another and, that if the recipient is old enough or compromised, she might die.

That was back when most people didn’t believe the virus was carried through air and she thinks of the way faith, too, can be passed between people, obviously, or this immaculate statue wouldn’t be towering over them now, someone’s proof or blind insistence Mary had risen. *

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But whenever she hovers over her mother’s headstone, her vision is not of a body drifting into the infinite, but of the hand that reached for her when she was too small to understand the heavy wreckage of drawing breath. The priests retreat.

She raises her hood and leaves the Cathedral, its silent choir.

She wants to hear only the soft eddy of her mother’s dress, its silken edge, or even this: the mouselike remains of prayer that her mother sometimes mumbled.