ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

 
FOUR POEMS
by Griffin Hansbury


The Days of Angels

How bored in this modern time
the order of the angels must be.
In Byzantium's gilded age
they swung the spheres like clock-
work through the mapped
and measured ocean of the heavens.

Seraphim ruled the top, moving
the Prime Mover, pressing
their soft luminous shoulders
to that burning wheel; while Cherubim,
hitched like winged horses,
hauled God's long wagon train of stars.

Life was good for a millennium
or so, until Copernicus came along
to put the Primum Mobile
in the middle of it all; and Galileo found
more moons than there were troops
of angels poised to move them.

Then God, weary of life at the sidelines,
took up His residence upon the throne
of the Sun, and sent his winged congresses
to busy themselves with the simpler tasks
of earthly work. Desk jobs, they cried,
paper-pushing, as they fluttered down

to our difficult world of weather and worry,
paycheck and heartbreak. Nowadays,
with the Universe going about its business
of expanding into infinity, with the planets
securely spinning by their own volition,
the angels walk the mild Earth, looking for work.

They loiter on street-corners, now and then
tugging back the collars of oblivious
pedestrians, inches from the traffic's crush.
Some, just for a change of pace, will whisper to us
the winning numbers, the right answers,
the location of a lost set of keys.

But in the drudgery of these common works,
the memories of angels fade. Forgotten
even are the complicated steps of a dance
they once could swing on the head of a pin;
and, gone the way of ancient history,
that balletic number, its coveted calculation.



Stepping into the Cow:
Looking at Damien Hirst’s “Some Comfort Gained...(1996, glass, steel, formaldehyde, two cows)” at the Brooklyn Museum of Art

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Leads't thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garland drest?
-- Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"


Through the domino-line of upright boxes --
fishy tanks filled with formaldehyde,
green as cool swimming pools--

we go weaving in between, through
the blessed bodies of cows, criss-crossing
the cross-sections of belly, brain,

milk-empty udder. Beautiful because
the truth is beautiful. Body of Cow,
true bread of life. Meat and milk of life,

these bodies have passed how many times
through our dark streams? Now, we drift
through theirs, like molecules, afterthoughts;

while, in the next room, the cows in Durrie’s
Summer Landscape Near New Haven
are serene, relaxing in the 19th Century green,

thinking of what? Certainly not of Art,
how they will remain here golden,
blissfully cow-like in this clover grass.

They dream of bovine things: alfalfa, calf,
the warm weight of sunlight on their backs.
They do not worry for their lineage,

the great-grandchildren who have come to this.
What lament have they for life’s prickly end?
The complaints of cows are few.

Sisters, forever offering up your bodies
for hamburger, bone china, Jell-O, and glue,
we love you. How closer can we get than this?

We enter you, like quiet knives,
go gliding from section to section, inspecting,
recalling all the happy ravished cows of our lives.



Uncertainty Principle

Delicate swirl of sub-atomics
jitter-bugging in the dark
parts of all our depths,
you are as unknowable

as the answers to questions
such as: Does God exist?
Why is there something
instead of Nothing? and

Does she love me still?
In her absence from me
I cannot be certain simultaneously
of both her whereabouts

and her how-abouts. I know,
at this moment, she is at her desk,
in her office, way uptown.
But I cannot see how she moves,

if she is eating a sandwich
or typing a letter. Nor can I know
what she is thinking, if she is
thinking of me.

To suddenly shine a light
upon her in her chair
would be to startle her
into acting not like herself at all.

She might close up like a clam,
or nervously twirl her hair,
or begin singing, “Clang clang
clang went the trolley,”

at the top of her lungs, until,
the light switched off, she would
fade back to her usual self,
as inscrutable as the quanta.



If Suddenly a Tiger

We take the train through Asia-in-the-Bronx,
New York. It is not Siberia, not Vladivostok
on the Sea of Japan, but here are tigers still
lounging in the grass, privacied from Pelham Parkway,
protected from the ruckus of the Boulevard nearby.

What stripes, what soft white bellies. Safe in this
captivity, the hunted aphrodisiac of their bones,
their blessed hearts and lungs, go on dozing, unminding
of what wildernesses thrum outside the fences
of this sweet green acre.

Do continents of snow shine whitely in their dreams?
Do their genes remember Russia? The miles of running,
hunger for hot blood on the tongue? On the other side
of this fence here, the blissful deer are grazing, untouchable
and unaware. The smell of them must drive the tigers crazy.

Here, now, they look so lazy; belly-up under the tulip trees.
Night will fall on the Bronx and what then? What longing
for the hunt will begin. Unbearable, the ache in those bones
(ground to powder and swallowed with water, those bones
will make you wild for love, women throw themselves

into your empty human arms) when night comes down
in its violet curtain--the people returned to their hotel rooms,
their cramped apartments, their soft tigerless beds --
certainly the cats must cry for Siberia, for chilled forests
filled with meat, for the memory of their fearful symmetry.

Achingly, we watch them. Hopelessly human, we lean
from the trembling metal of our tram, our silly cameras clicking
as if. As if tigers could be held like this. How we long to hold them,
to be among them. "What would you do if suddenly a tiger
were to climb aboard?" There would be nothing to do, but

give yourself to that tearing, original as sin, this thing
that tigers do. And we are meat, we are without stripes,
without the blush of their bright burning. How it was
in the time of those first fragile campfires, it would be. Frozen,
terrified, soft-bodied man, I would cower in this car and wait.