Читать книгу Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing - Marianne Boruch - Страница 9

Progress

These gargoyles can’t get enough of the view

stuck to their cornice, ratcheting out

open-mouthed as some

desert hermit on his pillar, fifth century.

Such a vision, probably horrific. The gargoyles

take it straight to the river

over giant trees. A kingdom. If there is

a river. Or a kingdom. If I walk that direction —

how a lock knows its key, how the key’s

little nicks and bites code fate: not unlatch but

continue, not release but come through.

Because it’s ancient: there is

no progress, only a deepening. Or not even that.

I heard progress is a modern invention, post–

bubonic plague. Right up to the airplane, the double sink

and running water, earlier

the milking stool, and monogamy in some places.

But Dante leapt

at it, his Purgatorio, thanks to before, when —

wasn’t it simple? Just heaven

or hell, friend. Sorry.

Thumbs up or down. Perfect weather or it’s endless

awfulness.

How does it work, this new

Purgatory business, Dante didn’t ask exactly

but dreamt first. Fabled searing

second chance lodged in the brain’s ever-after

means to be left, reimagine, watch

whole bits burn off. Memory

needs sorrow. Even stone at its most

mend-and-loss molecular level moves, and the hard

secret parts of us know that: tooth, skull,

envy, the stubborn vertebrae, guilt worn down by

exhaustion, by despair you walk with,

and long enough. Like a month. Like years.

It’s never simple. I learned what happened: gutters

replaced gargoyles. Those creatures sick of

siphoning rain off the roof with their long throats

stayed to scare evil out of the world, to be

merely beautiful and grotesque up there. Or they caution

back to us from the future, frozen

medievals, high-wire beings not of this earth

stretched, stunned to bone-limit, made possible again

by what they cannot bear to see. Now. Which is

lifetimes ago. I lose track of my transitions.