As shards of me fall from the sky as if shards of the sky — this weathering of me through the world.
All that remains of me are two horns, here in a Square, having lately grown from my head, then shed, scattered atop the earth, tipped and tumbled, and blown through by wind — Hear O Israelien, the hollowness of their howl…
Mere artifacts, for the museum we know as the future.
One day last, or so it’s been said, they’ll be found, on which end they’ll be sounded with lip and with lung: their blast to bloom up from the fundament, through a cadence toned to the heavens, reflectively pitched low to the grave…an opening, this cadence existing only between pitches, within them, this the moment of every conversion, the last — when air becomes sound, the assimilation of breath into call…a life, mouthforced into summons: a perfect interval, this high note rising ever further to kiss at the face of the void, resolving into a horizon on which the world will rest its revolutions, soon, in our time. And listen — this will be the death of both silence and Babel, of question and answer, all reborn as a freeing of air.
At the outskirts of my father’s dwellingplace, at the furthest limit of His encampment, there amid the ringing of haycocks where land gives way to earth, to pure planet — there’s an emptied barrack or prison thatch that once quartered killers of mine and of any other kind, too, murderers with governments and the sanction of uniform, weapon, and horse. It’s since become all board, nail, leak, and draft, its floor strewn with straw and that and its walls smeared with the sickening reek of wet hair, pelage, daily turd. Inside, inhabiting, there’s only a lone aged ram. It’s humiliated, made modest, as its burden’s considerable: how it’s dually imaged, as if once for each horn, for each half of the cadence responsible; this ram both existing of its kind, as the last of its species still grazing, and then existing for its kind, too, as their most imperfected survivor — most imperfected as their survivor, their last and their only; to be herded humbled, alone, as a herd of one and itself, up the ramp of an Ark, bound express for our covenant’s end: think the species’ lowliest, and most degenerate aspect, made ancient to wizened bellwether with raggedy coat, then hefted here to rume out its life once it’s downed its last golden door; it’s lost its horns, too…how they’d been stolen by night, by a boy and his father, and an angel that’d saved them both from a mountaintop altar. At the sound of my horns, my own shofars these shofarot twinned in the wind, one for each lip ended upon that lip of last day…how this ram despite wormy illness and old age will perk, turn itself dumbly, lean its head toward the gusting, an echo. Hoof mud. Now, charging its brutishly bared head, and with nothing to fear, forward and always, this ram will hurl itself against the furthest wall of the barrack, not east nor west but out, only out and with such fierce and wet woolen force — to knock everything down, to shatter it through, an escape, into unlimited space.
A new world.
One day, one night soon, in our time — we await.
The Museum of Museums
A lone long, thin reflecting pool as if a finger accusing in the image of which you only encounter yourself and your failings, though placid, usually — if not for the drizzle slowly descending; an eruptive fountain beyond, its hot, vitreous bubbling burbling the surface of the pool into which it flows sharded freeze, liquid glass smashed over, again, reflecting in sharp tawdry lights the limousines and taxicabs lately arriving, depositing, departing, dropoff; this melt of miniature ice floes, too, sounding like the joyous tears of attractive, in shape, wellinsured widows, loudly through the overprivileged, entitledly adolescent whine of the sirens: police escorts driving into skids, then straightening out again at the curb of the narrow redcarpet unfurled, soaked then shod dirtied halfway to black…at least the snow’s stopped, for now, heavy weather relented, RSVP’d regrets only, leaving us all with only the belated consolation of spring, its droolingly lazy rain not doing the least to distract Security’s athletic attention: strong menschs blondish and big, earpieced, vested and armed, crowded in a circle at the helipad up on the roof, readying the site for its arrivals due in from behind the clouds, any moment; snipers with scaleless eyes and snakeskin gloves hold down their rooftop positions; every available soldier’s either plainclothed on the ground or inside and dressuniformed, stationed Uptown east, to secure the Museum for tonight’s homecoming gala. A flow of fluttery dresses, the funereal austerity of blueblack tuxedos…who’s the corpse, he’s my husband, you have my condolences: notoriously bowtied bodies, they emerge from rare leathers to the fire of bulbs, a crowd mouthed mad for a glimpse or a grope. Menschs hold umbrellas for these guests, for the distance between door and carpet kept dry, then up the stairs, the landing, the stairs again and then in through the doors, into the specially decorated lobby: the thought that maybe they’ve got weather there, too, interiorly, those dim monstrous skies of galleries and halls leading to galleries further, with their own weather coming down from the ceilings, cathedrally vaulted, the swirling atmospheres of high domes.
A Museum, whisper insidevoices — a question, is there anything more indicative of the decline of the universe than a Museum, you think? too many reporters here tonight, watch your words, mind your mouth — though the universe, that’s a Museum itself, a Museum unto itself, isn’t it, wasn’t it? Questions, too many unanswered…is there anything more horrendously depressing, I’m asking? Who’s awake who would know? A Museum isn’t the end of the world, no, it’s the world itself ending, dying, happening as we speak, here and now — the as slow then only more terrifying murder of everything; the lightblind casechoke, display’s duststrangle, the peccant poison known as culture — which itself ’s only to be preserved, to sterility, never to engender again.