"Stone Angels" lyrics

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 symmery 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 parsimonious - 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 or out. No motion movies

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 cradle-song
Rage for day's end: impatiance like a boat in the evening
Towards the horizon, as down a sounding line
Barcarolle funeral march

Nocturne at high noon