Whether grace is merely a posture of
the heart, like pity or love,
or whether, speaking ontically now, grace
possesses a kind of material, even liquid, existence—
which would, you claimed, explain the scholastic trove
of watery words (the case
of “Thomist structures” enlightens): the persistence
of words like pouring, effusion, and streams. . . . All this,
and not much else but this,
we discussed at quiet length on the northbound A,
hurtling below a hundred wintry Manhattan streets
on our way to the strange museum—which, perched as it was
on the rocky, eastern quay
of the freezing Hudson, resembled a granite
eagle, with wings the height of an apartment story—
majestic, aviary-
freed—and talons sunk deep in the bank’s soft gut,
as its stone-carved back (the building’s front) stayed always turned
on the very fact of Washington Heights, like a quarry
it long ago forgot;
or rather: that it once knew, then spurned.
Then we were inside—where, pace Borges,
time’s unruly fleet of horses
merely found another, a different, order:
the way we glimpsed, through the roundels’ stained glass (which depicted,
in a stream of liquid yellow and blue, the various
and shameful swinish ordure
with which the Prodigal Son was afflicted)
—how we glimpsed (I got, get, so off track),
through that glossy laque,
the turgid hulk of Washington Bridge. Or, to say
the same again: how the suspended Christ, swaying
in death from the chapel’s curving vault, blocked,
from our squinting eyes’ assay,
the mandorla in which the Virgin was praying.
We wandered those quiet rooms and monastic towers,
you and I, for hours,
speaking only to note, with a nod or word,
the oddest things: the severed horn of a unicorn
(“only the horn of a narwal,” explained the dour
guide); or that crumbling bird,
which had stored, we read, a thorn
from the Crown of Thorns; or (my personal speed)
a brittle rosary bead,
which, when opened at the hinges, disclosed
a wooden city—tiny cathedrals, intricate huts,
horses a hangnail’s size—disclosed, indeed,
a world that, if closed,
would fit in your palm like a hazelnut.
Upstairs, stepping outside from shade to vista
(“Credo che non exista,”
the Italian woman, years before, uttered
before the unicorns’ gaudy tableaux), we shivered
in sun. Below, the peopled world—baristas,
bankers, stonecutters—
crossed without us the freezing river. . . .
Our “spot of time” was ending. We’d been, that day—
to the very, almost, day—
married a single year: imperfect, whole.
Hours prior (should I have led with this?), when we first arrived,
I stood before a Spanish fresco, gray
from age (“Late Medieval”),
and which, I learned, had barely survived
its international restoration. Despite,
though, the wear—how the whites
and, curious, the reds colluded—and despite, too,
the way his wailing friends (I should have named the painting:
from Berlanga, The Raising of Lazarus . . . a slight
mistake)—despite these few
mourners, I could just make out, running
like a dried ravine across the painted bier,
a wooden staff—or spear,
which (whichever it was) Christ seemed to be
using to haul His friend from death to life, from hell
to here. . . . Although, of course, His elbow’s angular
bend and bending knee
suggested the opposite passage, as well.