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In the house of the voice of Maria Callas We hear the baby’s cries, and the after-supper Rattle of silverware, and three clocks ticking To different tunes, and ripe plums Sleeping in their chipped bowl, and traffic sounds Dissecting the avenues outside.   We hear, like water Pouring over time itself, the pure distillate arias Of the numerous pampered queens who have reigned, And the working girls who have suffered The envious knives, and the breathless brides With their horned helmets who have fallen in love And gone crazy or fallen in love and died On the grand stage at their appointed moments— Who will sing of them now?   Maria Callas is dead, Although the full lips and the slanting eyes And flared nostrils of her voice resurrect Dramas we are able to imagine in this parlor On evenings like this one, adding some color, Adding some order.   Of whom it was said: She could imagine almost anything and give voice to it.

I Far-sighted into yesterday they stand, gripping their charters and speeches, the presidents and kings, masters of unconscious evil. Their deputies are here — judges, robed executioners, steely and triumphant. And stunned at their feet, the beheaded, the betrayed, healed and hallowed now in this grave sorrow of wax. II We enter, adjust to the gloom, to the lighting that plays on the painted, staring faces. We think to ourselves, murmur to the one standing beside us: "How compellingly strange these people are, and yet familiar to the world we left behind us, the street and the household..." These are the people whose names we learned, whose lives we studied, whose thoughts we have become. Each lighted stage with its play of the lost and the violent — comedians and stuntmen, heroes transfixed in purpose. We pause, to read once more, in deliberate, bald summation, what art, wax, and history have made of the dead: something more than a mirror, less than a telling likeness; an ideality slick with blood. III How easily in the live heat of truth and summer these actors wilt and perish. Henry of Church and England is here, savage and senile, still laced in his armor; his lopped and stunted wives stand grouped around him. Bismark in his iron corset, endlessly dividing Europe; Wilhelm, that struttng dwarf, abject in abdication. And here, the fatal mischief of Sarajevo — how swift a fire, how long a burning, came of the Archduke's festive ride, his shot and bloodied tunic. And no more telling prophecy in the wake of armistice than that one dated cartoon with its hooded sentry and its graveyard owl: "It has been six years..." How easily a puff of smoke, a square of burnt cloth, a shocked cry, can change the world, and leave it neither worse nor better. IV Here is a man, thief or martyr, hanged at Damascus Gate with a hook through his gut. He swung, seared by the sun and kissed by the night. And maybe one of the market women brought him water, and maybe not — once seen by the Sultan's watch, she might have lost her hands. As in the time of Richelieu, certain men the crown accused were exposed in iron baskets like plucked birds. They fouled their nests, starved and blackened until they died; and the city lived with their cries, their rank mortality, night and day. The hook is black and crescent, the body swings, inert, as if asleep and dreaming. The guidebook tells us the man survived his hook and lived; it doesn't say how long. V Here, with his tins and furs, is Minuit, buying Manhattan. We see the Dutchman's flourish, the Indians' foolish feathers. He takes their land, and they his bitter gifts, his brass and trinkets — so little cash in place of an earthy kingdom. Wolfe, Montcalm, on the plain below Quebec: the one dying, the other condemned to follow. We pass, reading from face to face, from book to book, uneasy that among these celebrations so many rigged transactions have gone unquestioned. And all our wigged colonials, our Franklins, conspiring with their strongbox keys and profitable lightning — that so much ink and dust and shuffled paper conceals their tidy pilferings, their purity and blunted wrath. Were there rooms in this house, each with its tabled motions and false partitions might furnish a history, one slow truth at a time. But never in our late arrival have we stilled confusion, to learn how great a folly follows in the wake of fathers. From their deliberate violence we come to our own lamed misrule, its slick banality and crime without passion. To Ike, to Kennedy and Ford, golfers and temporizers; to perennial candidate Nixon, whose cheek was never turned. Out of his sleek arrest he steps towards us, as if to greet a voter — a fixed, ferocious smile on the blue jowls brushed with powder. VI Nothing we have painted and framed in our passage — neither prayer nor courtship, nor solace of sleep and self — escaped the grip of these iron centuries. Here, in a row of lighted cases, a few artifacts are on display. No comfort to us now in that familiar, edged interrogation... But the biting persuasion of chains and collars, of inching racks, fire tongs and screws — in the eyes of kings and churchmen the instruments of truth. And whosoever might trespass, on whatever lawful ground, would find for his solace a more forbidding marriage. As once in a stone embrasure I saw a belt for virgins, a hinged and rusted clasp, with a lock, and a slit for functions — all but one. Imagine with what shocked dismay a man might grope for his sweetness there, and all too soon awaken, clamped in his ecstasy. VII Another room, with smaller people and thinner walls. Here the Queen plays with cryptic cards, hands out assignments: "You are the Hunchback," she says, "and You the Hangman, and You the Jack of Trades." She pares and quarters her venomous apple, calls for her mirror, and her image smiles to watch her glass fill up with poison. Beauty is sleeping, the Prince is awake, and far in the forest a frostlight winks from the Sugar House. The Witch is singing and lighting her oven. The Woodcutter's wayward children watch, they break and nibble the sweetened glass. The images whisper and darken, conspiring in their tumbled tale of fretful spinners, of drones and dumble- dores, wise eggs that speak and shatter. And it looks as if the painted sleepers in this dreamworks are about to awaken: the crafty Queen and her players, the musical mice, the drones and the spinners — All in a scampering rush, to find the nearest exit... As the looking glass draws us deeper into the bright play of shadows that melt and run and freeze... The mad, mad romp of children, of rabbits and dwarfs, who keep their strange hilarity in so much horror. VIII Call those from underneath, the sold and trodden, their slow and sweating sons, elevate and crown them. Patch up their clothing and wash their skins, rub their faces until they glow, and their dull eyes brighten. Give them speeches to learn, and eloquent gestures, power to grasp, laws to break and mend. Great heat and furious labor bring on in them this drear and mystical change: At first a swinish fattening, and then a leaner look, and in their eyes the same feral glitter of their late unkindly masters. They sicken as they flourish, until like wickless candles they slump and totter; their heads are rotten, their famous flesh has run to sticky pools. They die and sleep afoot, their ignorant hearts grown wise in the ways of wax. IX In all these wax memorials only appearance changes. Crowned heads and axes fall, thugs and jailors rise and displace each other in this long, uneasy walk we have littered with claims and captions. The heroes are always welcomed, are propped and shaven, their ruddy male composure is sleeker than ever, though the great sleeves and brutal collars give way to softer buttons. The paper in official hands rustles as before, though it is only paper, paper in cheap supply, and not the bleached fell of a difficult sheep. And yet the neat persuasions are seen to tighten, and each new litigation is a running noose... All that increases, all that gluts and fattens, matures its option here: Honor to thieves and merchants, long life to the butcher. And for the just petitioner — sweeper of the hallways, scapegoat and discard — no reply but the rote of legal fictions; to which he listens, now as in the days of Pontinus, stricken with understanding. X The rooms are large and numerous, and we in our restless striding find that they never end. It is as if we had lived here always, captive to this endless and malign instruction; had served those mighty tempers, and learned too well these never-blotted names. And we live here still, sharing these murderous spaces, this blood-haunted silence. And once we started from sleep, terrorized and whimpering, to see in the luminous, sunken light, the head of a long-forgotten agent: a face like a father, one who might have comforted, but cannot see or hear us: bald, vacant, and amused. XI All is as it must or might be, here at the story's end — the jury dismissed, the witness excused, and all are guilty. To have come so far, walked so easily through so much anguish, pride, and stupor of evil, and yet we are standing still, locked in an echoing foyer. In so driven, so brief an itinerary, a day will stand for a decade, an inch for a mile — so far has a painted fiction served us. These bones in their period costumes would bend if we touched them; their flesh would yield, and all arrangements topple. But see how they bring toward us the old, sustaining gestures — a stride, an arm outstretched — the furrows in the smiles deepen, and the red lips smear. Great captains command, obedient ranks go down. In all these propped assemblies I know a substance neither wax nor wholly flesh — a tried and mortal nature, familiar as the warmth in my hand. XII Were we not lost, condemned to repeat these names and to honor their crimes, a voice among us might cry out, speak to those who are stopped here: Whose faces are these that melt and run? Children and guardians, giants and dwarfs — Oh, people, people... Who are these heroes and where are their victims? We who are standing here with our guidebooks suddenly closed and all the exits darkened... Until another gallery opens, or the sun through that skylight strikes us all — souls in torment, pilgrims and doting fathers...

Here, where the noises of the busy town, The ocean's plunge and roar can enter not, We stand and gaze around with tearful awe, And muse upon the consecrated spot. No signs of life are here: the very prayers Inscribed around are in a language dead; The light of the "perpetual lamp" is spent That an undying radiance was to shed. What prayers were in this temple offered up, Wrung from sad hearts that knew no joy on earth, By these lone exiles of a thousand years, From the fair sunrise land that gave them birth! How as we gaze, in this new world of light, Upon this relic of the days of old, The present vanishes, and tropic bloom And Eastern towns and temples we behold. Again we see the patriarch with his flocks, The purple seas, the hot blue sky o'erhead, The slaves of Egypt,—omens, mysteries,— Dark fleeing hosts by flaming angels led. A wondrous light upon a sky-kissed mount, A man who reads Jehovah's written law, 'Midst blinding glory and effulgence rare, Unto a people prone with reverent awe. The pride of luxury's barbaric pomp, In the rich court of royal Solomon— Alas! we wake: one scene alone remains,— The exiles by the streams of Babylon. Our softened voices send us back again But mournful echoes through the empty hall: Our footsteps have a strange unnatural sound, And with unwonted gentleness they fall. The weary ones, the sad, the suffering, All found their comfort in the holy place, And children's gladness and men's gratitude 'Took voice and mingled in the chant of praise. The funeral and the marriage, now, alas! We know not which is sadder to recall; For youth and happiness have followed age, And green grass lieth gently over all. Nathless the sacred shrine is holy yet, With its lone floors where reverent feet once trod. Take off your shoes as by the burning bush, Before the mystery of death and God.

Unwitting accomplice in the scheme of law she thought to violate, man-set as it was, and, here, inconsequential as the sun at midnight, drought at flood-time— when she heard a baby in the tall reeds at the river’s brink, she was nobody’s daughter, subject of no rule but the one his need for her established as she knelt down to quell his crying with a little tune just seeing him there had taught her how to hum. Now as then, it is the same tune, timelessly in time, your mother hums as she kneels down beside your little barge of foam, smiling to see you smile when she wrings out from the sponge a ragged string of water over the chest and belly, the dimpled loins, the bud so far from flowering, and the foot slick as a fish your hand tries to hold up till it slips back splashing with such mild turbulence that she laughs, and you laugh to see her laugh. Here now, as it was then, it is still so many years before the blood’s smeared over doorposts, before the Nile clots with the first-born, and the women wailing,wailing throughout the city; here now again is the kingdom of pleasure, where they are safe still, mother and child, from the chartered rod of the Fathers, and where a father can still pray, Lord, Jealous Chooser, Devouring Law, keep away from them, just keep away.

It’s right before you drive away: our limbs still warm with sleep, coffee sputtering out, the north wind, your hips pressing me hard against the table. I like it hard because I need to remember this. I want to say harder. How we must look to the road that’s gone, to the splayed morning of cold butter and inveterate greed. Light comes and goes in the field. Oranges in a bowl, garlic, radio. In the story of us, no one wins. Isolation is a new theme someone says. By now I’ve invented you. Most people don’t like to touch dead things. That’s what my friend tells me when I find my fish on the floor. It must have wanted an out. Sometimes my desire scares me. Sometimes I watch football and think: four chances is enough to get there. But we don’t have helmets. I want to say harder, I can take it, but there’s no proof I can.

When you open the door, everything falls into place— the little ferry by the wharf, fir trees and thujas. An old woman, feeding ducks, seems as old as Leni Riefenstahl. At the base of the hill, chestnut trees, not yet in full bloom, are younger—but probably as old as her films. All is wet and bright. A hedgehog or God-knows-whose-soul is rummaging in last year's leaves. Dead water and living water fill the plain. The twins Celsius and Fahrenheit are predicting spring weather—while a shadow obscures the past (just like the present). The first serene weeks scour the bridges in a peaceful corner of Europe between Wannsee and Potsdam—where much has happened, but, probably, nothing more will. For days we have been watching a ragged crow—in the garden, sometimes on the roof. The ancients would have said her stubbornness augurs something. Emerging from the wood's depths, she lights on one antenna crossbar then another, her surface bright as mercury in a thermometer's glass. But these are fever marks we are incapable of understanding. The beginning of agony? The past does not enlighten us—but still, it attempts to say something. Perhaps the crow knows more about us and about history's dirt than we do ourselves. Of what does she want to remind us? Of the black photos, the black headphones of radio operators, black signatures under documents, of the unarmed with their frozen pupils—of the prisoner's boot or the trunk of the refugee? Probably not. We will remember this anyway, though it won't make us any wiser. The bird signifies only stoicism and patience. If you ask for them, your request will be granted.

House of five fires, you never raised me. Those nights when the throat of the furnace wheezed and rattled its regular death, I wanted your wide door, your mottled air of bark and working sunlight, wanted your smokehole with its stars, and your roof curving its singing mouth above me. Here are the tiers once filled with sleepers, and their low laughter measured harmony or strife. Here I could wake amazed at winter, my breath in the draft a chain of violets. The house I left as a child now seems a shell of sobs. Each year I dream it sinister and dig in my heels to keep out the intruder banging at the back door. My eyes burn from cat urine under the basement stairs and the hall reveals a nameless hunger, as if without a history, I should always walk the cluttered streets of this hapless continent. Thinking it best I be wanderer, I rode whatever river, ignoring every zigzag, every spin. I’ve been a fragment, less than my name, shaking in a solitary landscape, like the last burnt leaf on an oak. What autumn wind told me you’d be waiting? House of five fires, they take you for a tomb, but I know better. When desolation comes, I’ll hide your ridgepole in my spine and melt into crow call, reminding my children that spiders near your door joined all the reddening blades of grass without oil, hasp or uranium.

I heard from people after the shootings. People I knew well or barely or not at all. Largely the same message: how horrible it was, how little there was to say about how horrible it was. People wrote, called, mostly e-mailed because they know I teach at Virginia Tech, to say, there’s nothing to say. Eventually I answered these messages: there’s nothing to say back except of course there’s nothing to say, thank you for your willingness to say it. Because this was about nothing. A boy who felt that he was nothing, who erased and entered that erasure, and guns that are good for nothing, and talk of guns that is good for nothing, and spring that is good for flowers, and Jesus for some, and scotch for others, and “and” for me in this poem, “and” that is good for sewing the minutes together, which otherwise go about going away, bereft of us and us of them. Like a scarf left on a train and nothing like a scarf left on a train. As if the train, empty of everything but a scarf, still opens its doors at every stop, because this is what a train does, this is what a man does with his hand on a lever, because otherwise, why the lever, why the hand, and then it was over, and then it had just begun.

They are building a ship in a field much bigger than I should have thought sensible. When it is finished there will never be enough of them to carry it to the sea and already it is turning rusty.

Beginning to dangle beneath The wind that blows from the undermined wood, I feel the great pulley grind, The thread I cling to lengthen And let me soaring and spinning down into marble, Hooked and weightlessly happy Where the squared sun shines Back equally from all four sides, out of stone And years of dazzling labor, To land at last among men Who cut with power saws a Parian whiteness And, chewing slow tobacco, Their eyebrows like frost, Shunt house-sized blocks and lash them to cables And send them heavenward Into small-town banks, Into the columns and statues of government buildings, But mostly graves. I mount my monument and rise Slowly and spinningly from the white-gloved men Toward the hewn sky Out of the basement of light, Sadly, lifted through time’s blinding layers On perhaps my tombstone In which the original shape Michelangelo believed was in every rock upon earth Is heavily stirring, Surprised to be an angel, To be waked in North Georgia by the ponderous play Of men with ten-ton blocks But no more surprised than I To feel sadness fall off as though I myself Were rising from stone Held by a thread in midair, Badly cut, local-looking, and totally uninspired, Not a masterwork Or even worth seeing at all But the spirit of this place just the same, Felt here as joy.