Peter Balakian

1 In the rheumatic heat of July, when Public Enemy blared on the blasters in a time when arbitrage and foreign policy were bureaus of each other, I made a wrong turn off Broadway and wound up at St. John the Divine where I sat in the hot dark until the traffic died. * And a voice comes over some columns to the breeze of the Golden Horn over the cypress groves and flowing bougainvillea where the bright blue weather and the old seawalls come together, where crates of cardamom and musk are piled and the cattle hang in blood above the brass, where the grain boats stink and red pleasure barges drift where Jason sailed for his fleece— a voice comes out of the dead water. In great Sophia light pours in rosy bars on the porphyry and the green marble till the air blooms, and a chrysalis of lit crosses makes circles in the air. Light falls through the lunettes like arrows of gold that could’ve sneaked up the Virgin’s dress. Had the Holy Ghost flitted in it would’ve been lost in the glare and the kiss of peace Justinian blew from the ambo. * Incantations flutter and rhyme in the apse like wings in a cloud of incense thinning on the gold-leafed vaults where the tongue’s vibration lingers in the upper air, and rises and rises as if the dome could open to a half-hemisphere of heaven where in the translucent glitter of the Kingdom the Saints are poised in gracious robes with their thousand-year-frozen faces— the one truth glued on the grout of their lips. 2 I sit with the incense of memory, and a bath of dark pours from the vaults above the pew Outside, boutiques of money collide with the street fires in Harlem, whole skyscrapers are levitated by arbitrage, and the only inside takeover I can negotiate is myself in this pew with my herringbone jacket which I should chuck in the Salvation Army bin down the block, so I could join the line of choir- boys in their last innocent ritual as they stand before the mounted sermon sign “he shall bring forth judgment unto truth” (Isaiah 42:3). The Puritans because they believed God’s altar needs not their polish lifted the boulder of truth higher than the glittering face of the Nazarene once leaded in glass. For the spirit they swallowed stones and shattered all the panes. But beneath the lavender arch of a Canon Table in an old Gospel I once tasted the consubstantial dewdrop in the faded color of a peacock’s wing. So while a stone sinks to the bottom of my river, a peacock’s wing floats by the shore. Who tells it like it is: Isaiah or Procopius? 3 I started walking backward down the aisle when I heard and thought I saw in the strange fenestration of that light— a voice, first incoherent, and then sharp as if it were in my ear There is no reign that executes justice and judgment; is that why you whine?

The day comes in strips of yellow glass over trees. When I tell you the day is a poem I’m only talking to you and only the sky is listening. The sky is listening; the sky is as hopeful as I am walking into the pomegranate seeds of the wind that whips up the seawall. If you want the poem to take on everything, walk into a hackberry tree, then walk out beyond the seawall. I’m not far from a room where Van Gogh was a patient—his head on a pillow hearing the mistral careen off the seawall, hearing the fauvist leaves pelt the sarcophagi. Here and now the air of the tepidarium kissed my jaw and pigeons ghosting in the blue loved me for a second, before the wind broke branches and guttered into the river. What questions can I ask you? How will the sky answer the wind? The dawn isn’t heartbreaking. The world isn’t full of love.

For Michael Coyle and Donna Frieze 1 You said anyone could walk in with a pack of explosives as we passed through the crowds of tourists and school kids — under the glass-grid ceiling lit with sun. I was saying:She’s our earth, our body, our sex, as we drifted down the halls of statues and colonnades and hunks of facades of Greek temples until we found room 22, “The Hellenistic World,” where a bronze face in a glass box on the wall stared back at us. Head from a bronze cult statue of Anahita, a local goddess in the guise of Aphrodite (

1. A canvas with less turpentine, more hard edges, less bleeding, that was good for beauty, Frankenthaler in Art News in the dining car crammed with parkas and laptops micro-waved cellophane, plastic plates and canvas bags, and the valley under fog as the cows disappeared and when the green came back into view I could see the SUVs floating on the Thruway, the cows oblivious to the revved engines of trucks. The river glistened all the way to Albany, and I could see flags on Baptist churches and resurrection trailers, “God Bless America” on pick-ups— “United We Stand” laminated to billboards as the fog settled then lifted, and when I woke a flag the size of a football field hung from the gray tower of the GW, where the tractor-trailers jammed beneath its hem as something sifted down on the silver-plated Hudson. And then the lights went out. 2. The faces on 7th Avenue blurred in the chaos of vendors and liberty scarves, freedom ties, glowing plastic torches, dollars and polyester— and inside Macy ’ s I was hit by cool air as “Stars and Stripes Forever” floated down from women's fashions into the quiet aisles of Aramis and silk scarves. I wanted to buy the Frankenthaler, a modest, early print, minimal, monochromatic; surface and perspective in dialogue; on 24th off 10th—the gallery still smelled like wood and plaster— but I didn't stop, and when the train reached the Stock Exchange the Yom Kippur streets were quiet, and the bronze statue of Washington was camouflaged by national guard. I was walking my old mail route now like a drunk knocking into people, almost hit by a cab until the roped-off streets cut me at the arm. At Broadway and Liberty the fences wound around the bursts of dust rising over the cranes and bulldozers, over the punched-out windows— I stared through a piece of rusted grid that stood like a gate to the crystal river. I was sweating in my sweatshirt now, the hood filling with soot, as I watched with others drinking Cokes and eating their pizza of disbelief. Zero began with the Sumerians who made circles with hollow reeds in wet clay and baked them for  posterity. At Broadway and Liberty. At 20 floors charred and standing. At miasma people weeping. Anna's Nail Salon, Daikichi Sushi, the vacant shops, stripped clean in the graffiti of dust-coated windows. Something blasted from a boom box in a music store, something, in the ineffable clips of light, disappeared over the river.

The tide’s a Bach cantata. The beach is the swollen neck of Isaac. The tide’s a lamentation of white opals. The beach is free. The Coke machine rusted out. Here is everything you’ll never need: hemp-cords, curry-combs, jade and musk, a porcelain cup blown into the desert— stockings that walked to Syria in 1915. On the rocks some ewes and rams graze in the outer dark. The manes of the shoreline undo your hair. A sapphire ring is fingerless. The weed and algae are floating like a bed, and the bloodless gulls— whose breaths would stink of all of us if we could kiss them on the beaks— are gnawing on the dead.

All summer the patio drifted in and out of light the color of margarine; days were blue, not always sky blue. At night the word Algeria circulated among the grown-ups. A patient of my father had whooping cough, the words drifted into summer blue. The evenings spun into stadium lights. Kennedy’s hair blew across the screen. Castro was just a sofa. I saw James Meredith’s face through a spread of leaves on the evening news. The fridge sweat with orangeade, the trees whooped some nights in rain— a kid down the street kept coughing into his mitt. Static sounds from Comiskey and Fenway came though the vinyl, the plastic, the pillow— So when it left Stallard’s hand, when Roger Maris’s arms whipped the bat and the bullet-arc carried into the chasm the disaffections at 344 ft. near the bullpen fence under the green girder holding up the voices rising into the façade and over the river where a Baptist choir on Lenox Ave. was sending up a variation of Sweet Chariot into the traffic on the FDR that was jammed at the Triboro where a derrick was broken and the cables of its arms picked up the star-blast of voices coming over the Stadium façade spilling down the black next-game sign into the vector of a tilted Coke bottle on a billboard at the edge of the river where a cloud of pigeons rose over Roosevelt Island. It was evening by the time the cars unjammed and the green of the outfield unfroze and the white arc had faded into skyline before fall came full of boys throwing themselves onto the turf with inexplicable desire for the thing promised. The going. Then gone.

8/1 From here groomed fields and clumps of trees, a silo of corrugated tin and a white barn blur. Unseasonable cool days, high, blue, a few clouds like ripped pillows as if this were a lip of the North Sea and I could look out and imagine Denmark. But I’m in my office three floors up. 8/3 In Armenian there’s a word—garod—rhymes with “maud.” The beautiful ones are not faithful and the faithful ones are not beautiful— a student said that about some Pavese translations, here in my office. Should I tell you what garod means? 8/5 What’s happening in Spitak and Sarajevo and the West Bank is splayed like the cortex of a silicon chip in the fuzzy air. Maria, the physician from Armenia, was 25 & had one plastic arm and one real arm. I met her in East Hampton on the deck of a house on the dunes. After the earthquake she had no husband, no parents, and only one child. “I’m in a good mood today,” she said, “let’s talk about something else.” I poured her an Amstel Light. 8/10 The coolness intrudes— month of wind-sprints and retching for the coach. It comes back like nerve ends after surgery. Along a country road cicadas rattling. Chicory and sweet pea intruding on the ripe barley. I picked up some seed packs from a junk shop on Rt. 20, a tomato blazed in red ink/ 1926, Fredonia, N.Y. 8/11 What’s between us? The red ink of the tomato? How does an image stay? Or is it always aftermath? The way deep black reflected the most light in Talbot’s first calotypes. But garod: tongue of a snake, meaning exile, longing for home. Thomas Wedgwood got images by getting sunlight to pass through things onto paper brushed with silver nitrate: wings of a dragonfly, the spine of an oak leaf— fugitive photograms. But he couldn’t stop the sun until it turned the paper black. Stop the light before it goes too far? Or is desire what garod means? Longing for a native place. 8/17 Maria said she was learning how to connect nerve endings in the hand so hands and arms would work again. There were so many in Armenia without working hands and arms. At the end of each dendrite is a blurred line like the horizon I’m squinting. Image of the other: light-arrested; not the image of ourselves. 8/21 After digging scallions one day Dickinson defined freedom: Captivity’s consciousness, so’s liberty. Maybe garod is about the longing for the native place between two selves. 8/22 I love the brute force of silence in Roger Fenton’s Sebastopol from Cathcart’s Hill, 1855. The Crimean inner war. The artlessness of silver is like my tongue in your wet space, or like the news photos that bring us the pressure of disaster. Beloved topography, garod then must mean yearning. Is that how we loved under the rattling Nippon porcelain, in the light calotyped by the fire escape? 8/25 garod: the grain chute that spills into a dark barn which is endless, like the self when it’s out of reach. Are we so lonely that a constellation could blacken and fill up that same barn, and that be me or you? But still we’re piss and oats and stock in there. We’re like civet, who wouldn’t love it. 8/31 the new glass-plate pictures: transparent as air, Szarkowski wrote like windows the fragmentary, scruffy, particularity of real living behind them—