"A Certain Slant"
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“Over the centre of the North
doorway, we see a Virgin Mary;
the child has been destroyed.”
            —Guidebook to Notre-Dame de Paris

What there is to say about light
stained glass says. And what
there is to say about the saying
is often said in the translation
of saying, in the preliterate light
diffused by centuries of il-
lumination—by those who must withstand
both the light and its reformation,
the shuffling dust and thick-necked press
of tour groups in from the downpour,
mid-day, beneath the North Rose.

Here that smell is on us once again,
come round like a season, the smell
of tulips two weeks after bloom,
or some human smell, some sweat
diffused like light among the few who
come to worship where few still come
to offer thanks or confess, this thick press
moving as the light moves in spaces
insensitive to light, like red-blotched
Srebrenica snow or an orange tongue
licking Varsovia’s golden wounds.

And bus after glistening bus unload
and unload into the mix, a communion of
breads turned flesh—wheat, white, rye, and gray—
an imitation of the world’s boulangerie,
as if to say, “Isn’t soda from the ashes
of plants and high-grade silica heated to fusion
beautiful! Aren’t metallic oxides, iron and
copper, manganese and cobalt beautiful!
Isn’t grisaille fired to black permanence
beautiful! Isn’t molten paste blown to radiant
thicknesses, glazed in fragile radiance

beautiful!” As if to say, Aren’t we
beautiful! Such an achievement of light!
—a monument to the long dead, to half-
carved gargoyles and unworked lead,
to the architects of light whose quick lives
weaken our knees at the sight. Such
an achievement of light!—a monument
to the recent dead, and to us, perspiring,
dizzy from incense and candle-heat,
half-conscious of our preparations not
for death but to make more dead,

to sanctify our alleluias, our cathedral tunes.
Among the press of tour groups, the whir
of Sony and Canon flash, beneath
the dimmest rose, mid-day, can we not see
open countryside, and wide, bright fields
of tulips, reds so brilliant our eyes ache
to take them in, an intense brevity of tulips?
—And are we not anxious then to move along,
break from the dim microbes of our scuffing along,
and re-enter the earthy smell of light rain
clipping its early wings on glass?