Angels Grieving over the Dead Christ

The epitaphios of Thessaloniki From those few famous silkworms smuggled Into Constantinople in the head of a walking stick Silk waterfalls Poured from the ancient bolts Into now-destitute reservoirs Of church treasuries in Aachen, In Liège, in Maastricht, in Sens, In the Sancta Sanctorum of the Vatican, Bright rivers seeping past The age when a teaspoonful of Silkworm eggs the size of one grain Could endow a church, The age when the letters in the words Of sacred testaments were Unreeled in the coastal cities of Asia Minor, When a bookworm conspired To wrest a maze of empty roads Through the words My Lord— That ancient, flickering text Once permanently affixed By blind but face-picturing, speechless But law-breaking wooden shuttles, Now a heap of gold wires displayed With a crumbling silk vestment someone Plucked from a shovelful of dust During one of those treasure hunts conducted In the burying grounds, in other eras, A shovelful of dust Now blowing into your eyes, As if a storm wind from Paradise Blew the rumors of this death So hard you must cover your eyes Before the museum case. The late afternoon tugs At a gold thread you can hear fraying When you close your eyes, A thread you feel your way along, A thread at which the invisible globe pulls, Leading you to the end of the world Where there is a pile of Clothes stolen from the grave, Where your fear is relegated To a masterwork of silk slaves— That He is dead. Here death is only a flash of worlds Unfurled from a rifled Church treasury, and you are invited To walk this alluvial wave of gold, To walk in the labyrinths Of the angels’ howls, To run your hands along the walls Of the silk thread’s passageways, To feel with your fingers The angels’ barbaric, stifled, Glittering vowels Tightly woven with gold wires. If you were to tug at one, Unraveling the angels Into a vivid labyrinth of thread From the fourteenth century Backwards to the scissors blade A seraph takes to a fragile Filament of gilt According to a law still unrevealed, The shroud would disappear In the gust of a little breeze From this door left ajar Into the next life, The threshold we cross with closed eyes— Where angels hide behind their backs The saws with which they mean To saw the present from the past, Oblivious to the scarlet threads That prove to be hidden among The filaments, those red rivers Running through the theme of time So shockingly—so before you set foot there, Take heed. This is the work Of Byzantine silk slaves confined To the palace grounds at Constantinople, And you must beware. There was a way station On the Silk Road Where the authorities executed Traitors in a wooden box In innumerable, unspeakable ways. When you touch this shroud from the east You take that hundred feet of road. You must walk softly past. You must try not to look. The torrent of words—later, later. Here tongues are cut out, And that is why the howling Is mute, Gilded, herringboned. Because although this is death, It is the work of slaves Whose task was only To expose the maximum amount of gold thread To the ceiling price of so many nomismata Per square inch, in a swift mischief Of curious knots, of mazes Flashing past, of straight paths Made inextricable, So look again. The angels wring their hands Over a statue. They are deranged, But not by grief. They mourn Not a body, but a work in bronze. They do not bring a mortal to the grave. But we onlookers who grieve and grieve— We cannot relegate this thought To a glory woven cryptically In heavy silks; We cannot consign it, sweep it off, For we cannot weigh In our palms the empty cocoons, We cannot study Within the secret workshops Of the silkworm, We cannot touch the boiling Water where the spools whirl, We cannot learn firsthand The bleakness of the craft With which God made the world, We cannot recount the legend that, When they met face-to-face, both God and the worm laughed.