CANTO VI: LOSING FAITH

Heaven was dark. The Sky: inked utter black.

And all the usual Light which once would fall

in spectral baths: nocturnalized, and dyed

to grief (as if Eternity loomed sad

to mourn believing—mourn the Angels, strewn

like rags and still unburied on the fields

of blemished Heaven).

Still, in spite of shade

and all the beating the Above had taken,

all spirits of Elysium remained

…unchanged… unpiqued to any overt fear

or anger unbecoming saints! (who’d rest

undaunted by the reckless wheel of Fate—

in sureness of immutability).

Denial damns all doubt from doubtful minds.

So on the Feasts of Heaven cycled round—

in darkness: saints and Angels all the light

to light Elysium like ghosts, in flames

that flickered now upon the Gothic walls

in candle-wisps of white, revealing cracks

(by starkness) of a crumbling masonry…

The LORD was nowhere. Empty lay His Throne.

And though I walked, half-dazed, amid the trance

of Heaven’s denizens’ delusion—deaf

to care—I had the fear, and wandered down,

through aisles that spliced their plodding ritual,

in terror.

Deep through the Basilica

I brought my hobbled certainty… Huge walls

and once-bright windows now stood drab, and cold—

the soaring arcade piers and archways lonely—

and as I walked I sought the LORD through all

the vacant hollows of the Overworld…

Then, turning down into the colonnades

whose stony spaces coat the outer aisles,

I saw Him—far away…

far off

alone,

inside the dark and epic solitude

of a side altar, pacing up and down…

His Self-emitting Glow embalmed it all

within with lambent light like dancing light

on jostled water. And the gravity

of all the world seemed heavy on His back,

which, even from so far a distance, seemed

a thousand crosses of a crucifixion.

I knew, of course, Omniscience knew I saw Him,

and yet I felt it secret as I stared…

until some knocking sense of impudence—

irreverence—hurt my heart (the way it will

when boys catch weeping fathers at their pain)

and I departed.

Out, upon the fields

(those cloudy tundras, shaded by the night

that came on omen), human beings sought

their myriad dead amid the fog and blood,

for funereal offices more just

than souring into dust upon the wasteland.

Now all of them are brought within the camp.

Huge pyres are lit—their speckling blaze of hives

re-lending Paradise some glint of brilliance

as vast environs of Elysium

glow flecked with lamentation in the dark

of murk and mourning. Job, no alien

to these, broods over all. And as he does,

he weeps, and tears his clothes, and wrecks his face

with ash and graven wrinkles, beats his chest

for loss and summons all humanity

to curse a careless God for “Slaughterer”

and shake their fists at Heaven.

Few pay heed.

They are too ruined deep within; to feel

is too confusing. Millions stand, or sit

in bands, to gaze with looks emotionless

on scattered pyres now smoking with their friends

and former world. The older one has passed

away, its demarcation line scratched deep

and all-indelible: dug wounding-like

in winding trenches as a scar—and signed

with blood (where Faustus’ guns gave signature

by touching Angels to the dry white page

of ground, and stained it mud).

…What have they done?

some think, afraid in mind (and yet assured

in gut) they’ve killed their own soul’s guardian Angel…

Where tends this strange adventure into Air

for overthrowing? No one now could say…

as all the wearied faces sat and stared

at crackling flame, incinerating what

and who they were, and what has been—while blind

to all that ash and dust might chance become…

True, some proved coward. Under guise of night

they sought their hubris’ Tower for the Earth

(…or, lost, threw bodies headlong from the clouds

in want of some ablution).

Most remain.

They know they carry what they’ve seen and done

within them. There can be no back, nor down—

but only up and onward. All must burn,

for nothing from the prior days of Faith

can be retained, once God—Faith’s fundament—

has blackened.

So, since sleep, for many, slinks

away (unten- and unobtain-able),

sad crowds lounge loitering in anxious night

and seek distraction from their nightmare-thoughts:

dancing-and-song numb drug enough for most,

while others seek diversion in the stuff

of war’s assembly line, and make of cars

and Faust’s contrivances some sport and toys

for thoughtless playing on.

Beside them, men

who’d held the frontline of assault—and shelled

Elysian Angels into carrion

from once-eternal Forms of perfect beauty—

these dazed and drooping, maniac of mind,

these shell-shocked saboteurs of Ideal art

meander lost amid the labyrinth fires

and stammer, babbling, idle syllables

of grim report, and fumble feral-like

in sopping cloud to make them more a beast.

“Dah…dah…” they’d stutter, turn to those who pass

and say, “…I am the executioner

of pretty things…”

Still others took it smiling.

With sureness in their task, and confidence

of optimistic revolutionaries,

gods after God were planned, and penned with words

upon the pamphlet of the air. For some

see His successor in their great Machine:

synthetic savior: mock-Empyrean,

within whose common effort they’d found aim

in laboring, and shed their soul for cog.

Beneath the umbral night, they whisper dreams

by flickering of a Lord State, whose gears

their Working turns. But others disagree,

and in their mything for the dawn, draw God

from Blood and Genes, theologize the Race,

and pray the human flaw forgiven by

messiahs in a Super-Man: our Fall

was mingling—till eugenic grace restore—

and as they wait resumed hostility

round burning pyres of souls, with burning souls

they dream of futures in an Aryan

Elysium…

Around some blazing mound

stacked high with bodies fluttering off to ash,

sat Faustus, staring: lost within a mind

whose thoughts (like all the pyres’ flesh-powdered wind)

transported him from present warming skin

to buoyant raptures:

What new world awaited…

Impending triumph of man’s Reasoning…

Ascetic dogma down—and God deposed!

as former phantoms fall, and yield to science…

Now, as he sits, dark crews rise out the mines

his faction’s dug into the Firmament:

unnatural caverns quarried deep, deep down,

whose walls and primal arteries men pry

and prod for Elements; seek Matter’s core

in the original—to seize the tools

of the Demiurge, and rape the cosmos’ plan.

Ascending steaming from the hole, they plot

and whisper, scheme with hands on mouths at ears

of Faustus, listening…

Scores sitting round

hear only breathy hints of something grand

…of some new, grave discovery—that rends

a causal world. “…deepest uncertainties…”

and “…only probability in all…”:

the atom offers each profound new means

to war with God.

Conferring thus with these,

and other chemic daedaluses (proud

with fresh, newfangled metal weaponry),

a lively Doctor Faust ascends a stand

and calls the idle regiments to arms:

“My dear Progressives! Armies of the Truth!

Come! Band again together, friends! bold men

and women—liberators from the Stars!”

(as waves of fire-lit eyes washed slowly forward…)

“We seek more scuff and battle with the Heavens,

no? What more Progress do we make at ease?

(as though we strove for but a property

above the Earth) We didn’t come to lease

some nearer gaze on what we loathe—but break

our bonds and slay our Overlord! Come, then.

At dawn we end our slavery. Slay God—

and slaughter Angelry! Complete what we’ve

begun!”

So Faustus called (with such-like spurs

to lagging zealotry), rekindling force

and fire within the hearts of them, and sparked

insurgency as from a mess of embers.

Then, under stealth of darkness, hands returned

to sweat and heavy industry: new plans

drawn up—and greater, more ingenious grand

designs for arms and engines, worse machines,

as every ounce of ore and energy

and thought, material, and force abet

one single, epic effort and idea:

Destruction…

…Waking up from a dark spell

of dreamless sleep (and of that sort which seems

as if it’d been a year or just an hour

whose dreary afternoon repose confused,

and ended weary as it had begun),

I slowly felt some light—of Dawn?

—returned!

(if just in creeping slivers on the floor

through tint of glass) and, just as soon, rejoiced—

(for I was far from certain that the Dawn

would shine again!)

Taking my harp in hand, then,

to greet a quiet and still-sleeping Heaven,

I rose as well, then knelt in orisons

and morning ritual to thank the LORD

for sun. But, as I did, I felt—then heard—

all early calm of daybreak broken: war

came with the light—to crush all peace above.

Out, on the endless air, in scenes stained pink

by Gothic glass and windowed scripture, scores

innumerable, and dizzying to eye—

of multi-million marching regiments

and swarming myriads of men, compact

in rectilinear battalions, blacked

by distance into bleak infinities

of insect lines, and marching…marching—sped

in stepping hordes upon the thunderheads

of Sky, and came towards Heaven. I watched all

within, and stared in reawakened horror

through the high panes of shaking Parables

on men’s campaign, renewed.

Heaven saw too,

and, swift as impulse, mustered into form:

t h e v a s t E M P Y R E A N

of Seraphim

and Angels in their arcs! assembling up

in rising gyres above the crystal peaks

and emerald Citadel: horrific, dark,

and huge.

Their billion beating wings waved strong

and oared the air: thrashing chiropteran

thick-fluttering in swarm—till Heaven quakes,

each human ribcage resonates with flight,

and all the tingling world resounds a deep,

deep rippling, darkness flapping like a cloth:

an undulating flag in hurricane

harsh winds seek off.

But in the gloaming sky

(lit up by flood lights on a rolling march)

the still-dark dawn sheds ink and night on God’s,

casting His Angels in a silhouette,

stark black—that Seraphs seem more demon-like,

or bats (when from some storm-lit cave they’re roused

and flood the air).

So all the Overworld

vibrates with war, each side remobilized

and churning force on force—that, from my view,

the ground seemed winding, and the sky a spool,

(men: sunken pebbles to a drinking Drain)—

God’s vortex drawing, as to pull them through—

and all the Angels, all the people too:

the gears propelling Time, and burning fuel

of human history.

But—what was that?

Some deep, low buzzing seared the rippling wind—

a droned cacophony come pouring in

as though a hive, tucked hidden overhead,

spewed onto Heaven some thick bath of bees

to drown Hosts’ fluttered dirge in murmuring…

…Then,

breaking through the overcast,

it comes—

Robotic bugs or leaden locusts—virus—

Down from the sky, vast steel armadas lunge:

a swooping fleet of war planes like a plague,

bombarding Heaven—silver hornets—flies—

metallic vultures in formation: high,

high up—descending now upon the Rose

and cycling Seraphim: to break their arcs

and burst their round Empyrean.

Like streams

of hurtling darts, they surge toward the Center,

aiming propeller noses for the Star:

the Angels’ axle, and the gleaming Hub

extending out their winged rotations.

Down,

into its heart, these million bombers plunge

and hurl themselves, injecting like a drug

of death, and humming engines—plane on plane

colliding into all: to cleave their sphere

and blast Almighty’s soldiery apart!

Their bullet hits the mark and—how it tears…

scrambling their ordered ranks, and rupturing

the Form—the even Circuit disarrayed,

as war impregnates and implodes the Orb,

with revolutions interrupted.

Now,

their charges planted, all the aircraft bloom

from their compacted dart—and detonate

the Holy Flower of the LORD.

With fire

and bullets sweeping from inside, they set

their missiles on chaotic Hosts and gun

the Angels down! Swept from the twilit sky—

like gorgeous swans in flocks a rifle grounds

(or moons of ivory sent careening off

from ancient orbits round a starry world)—

the mangled Seraphs fall, and burst apart

when, crashing to the cloud, their bodies cleave,

and all their ichor out. Still others fight,

wrangling with war planes in the bedlam Rose

and wrestle—wings of steel with wings of down—

till both drop woven from the warring air

and burst to conflagration far below.

…But

where was God?

The crumbling Rose revealed

He wasn’t at the core. Instead, a hole:

a rotten vacuum as infected fruit

will show, when through some peach or plum your teeth

intrude and stumble on decay. So glare

the Empyreal hollows—like a womb

still-born—that, though the war planes fan and swerve,

tracing the contours of sphered cavity

(like darting outlines that electrons lend

to paint a round thing from nihility)

they seek a wanting and all-absent LORD

in disappointed Regicide…

Still, wounds

inflicted by their infiltration prove

too fatal, too complete—that now, at once,

Angel on Angel, Throne on Throne, and Princedoms,

Virtues, and Dominations, Powers: all,

all arcs of Angelology and Spheres

of the celestial order

break

—break up

and part: exploding outward like a star

that’s spent in white Seraphic nova flame.

…To watch the rupture of Empyrean?

strange that I did not cry… fall down, and weep

inside a shaken, scared Basilica…

But there are beauties in sublime dismay—

appalling tragedies that, when they come,

seduce us by the cataclysm: and we

obey. So was it then, and I stood awed,

to see how eerily the Seraphim

appeared as florets in a rushing wind

when off they’re whispered from a dandelion…

Still, Earth was far from victory with this.

The high, colossal Sphere had shattered, but

like showered glass-shards from a broken bulb

descended now upon the surging floor,

point-first. (So bees from boy-broke hives; so drops

the lava; so the shockwave, fired from fire:

prophetic to its own catastrophe.)

Belling their opal fall (like tumbled wine

that overflows its brimful bowl to coat

a granite table), Angel floods pour up

and out and down—as bowed magnetic fields

erupt out of the sun in polar crescents.

Now, over fields of cloud, they swoop and skim,

all hurtling forward at the charging men

who brace for hard collision.

“H o l d!” yelled Faust

through chaos, fear, confusion, rushing—noise

burying thought—horizons pulverized

by vast infinitudes, and sweeping vistas

blotted with bodies and invasion—lands

of shaking thunderheads as endless as

eternity: seething with them, with men,

with mutinous, apostate hordes in fields

of gray humanity.

The Angels near—

now: shrieks—and cries—

and all at once both meet

in a deciding Battle of the Stars.

Hard—like the rams’ heads’ crackling, horn to horn—

these billion bodies of God’s Angelry

and angry men collided—crashing chests

and arms on wings-and-chests-and-arms, and bone

on bone: shattered in the explosion! Mess

in violent chaos issued out. Two waves

converge and froth confusion on a sea:

so was it then, a million-fold (if seas

foamed red and bloodied at the bubbling merge)

and all was pandemonium in Heaven.

Yet human hosts prove greater force, and at

their union, over-stormed collapsing wings

and spears—as one tectonic plate, above,

will plunge the under to the mantle-core.

So trampled, broken Angels floor the feet

of a wild stampede, and human armies roll

the battle back towards the Wall.

Then

—tanks—

enormous hulks of iron, plodding death—

like armored elephants—metallic, black,

and mounted ivory-tusked artillery—

extend their steel erections out and burst

a belching fire—

(…smoke spumes and far away

a hundred Angels shatter into bits

of spinal cord and coiled intestine)

—burst—

and burst again—A volley of a thousand

pummel the cloudscape with their slender pipes

and stir a shrapnel mist from blood and steel.

But Angels too mete rage. Some tackle men

and—rising, meteoric—surge themselves

up! up! into the highest air! clutching

like eagles or a bird of prey its pelt

a dangled man, sharp-taloned to the sky—

to drop! For, in the brittle atmosphere

and windy arctic heavens over Heaven,

their grips are loosed, and down their cargos fall,

that all above the hectic battlefield

loud, steady hails of human beings streak

the sky with screams, and rain down evenly

to puddle into corpses on themselves.

Elsewhere, the savage struggle thrashes fierce

and crude, as, hand-to-hand, combatants brawl—

men beating Angels with their broken fists,

and brutal scientists at bludgeoning.

Some Seraphs too turned madly animal,

and, in a violent grief (for on their skin

glimmers the crimson fluid: streaks of friends

men slaughtered into stains and butcher’s goo)

mauled at the faces of the victims caught,

and screamed their heartache hoarse.

…Their eyes will haunt,

forever haunt me… (I—what could I do?)

For I stood gaping in a quiet room

and kept my window, looking down on war…

as though, in all the ruin of my world,

I read a book laid out, and every word,

dissolving—fighting God: like paragraphs

conspiring into regiments at dawn

to burn down Heaven round a child.

But down

they go: down Raphael, down Uriel,

Zerachiel, and Sachiel, and down

Seraphiel fell silent in the fog;

and down the Seraphs, down the Hosts of God—

too like the hay-stuff in the grass, blown off—

and down Salvation tumbles from its Cross

and from my heart: far brittler of a thing

than faith would have imagined, or have thought…

But in the bleeding of the fray was Job,

who now, as in the eerie calms that reel

tumultuous hurricanes around a pause,

had stumbled face-to-face with some great force,

alike unarmed: the looming Peniel—

or ‘Angel of the LORD’—and stood unmoving…

“…WHAT IS YOUR NAME?” the Spirit asked (afraid?

or nervous at such intimate exchange

amidst the sweeping anonymity

of slaughter?) Job just stared, as battle burned

and chaos bloomed around. “My name?” he scoffs,

“Why ask a man his name? No sooner sung

its music ends, and dies upon the air.”

—(beside him, thousands fall, and breathe their last

upon the trembling Firmament of Meaning)—

“Though… true. In those brief tones lie symphonies

of suffering (if only varying fugues

upon a theme). Man’s but an uttered breath:

a spate of sound, and then eternities

of silence. Glory’s echo loiters, soft…

—but fades in rapid decrescendos down

to infinite fermata rests. And only

a fool… a fool upon some jingling jest,

would fiddle time with names! lying with sound

and hoping in his heart that names might stir

once life’s vibrations still, or stand as waves

to beat on some immortal shore.

But all is

…hushed.

Names are toys as well: the sounds we give

to dying things. So come, and let me take

mine to the grave. Death is a fame—much noise—

which everyone must know.”

Then, all at once,

as if unplucking sutured memories

(say, of a boy, a wife, a daughter: pressed

beneath the wretched onus of the world)

Job’s face turned cloudy, and a grimace sneered—

as, with a primal moan to break his heart’s,

he leapt upon the Angel of the LORD!

On thunderheads, and fog—wrestling, with grunts,

and vicious blows—the two rolled madly round—

and snarled—and growled—until (in spite of age,

and all the wear and bruises of his pain

in toiling time), Job pinned the Seraph down,

and howling in the air a monstrous wail,

he crushed its face with blunt-force to the eyes.

Now, lying on the ground, and heaving hard,

and throbbing by the corpse of it, he sighs:

“So have I struggled with God… only now

at last

prevail…”

So: slaughter.

Everywhere.

Slaughter and murder on a mythic scale—

not just in magnitude (though it was vast:

Angel and man spread out, bacterial:

black, writhing dots upon the film of mist

and sick, staphyloccoccic clouds), but here

raged slaughter of premier import, whose worth

was great, and in this scale aghast. For on

the life which was its Purpose fed the bug,

turning infection tragic and profound—

decaying, inside-out, the human soul,

spit up—and decomposed Elysium.

Just then—the ground beneath me shook… the walls

trembled and quaked… A sudden thunder pierced

the clamor of the muffled war below,

and then my stained-glass window

shattered!

Down

in vibrant flecks and shards, the Parables

came pulverized,

their crystal colors

broke—

slivers of Christ, and the Apostles:

points,

as dust and rubble blanketed.

I reeled—

thrown backward by the deafening blast, and lay

in pain and powder. Through that gaping hole

poured loud cacophonies and savage floods

of the unmuted war, as I looked out

and saw the bombers flying, flying off

like southward geese in V-shape overhead.

“My God…” I whispered, horrified with awe:

“They will.

They’ll bring It down…”

Indeed, all round me

the bombs were going off, and all the walls

of Heaven were exploding. Blast on blast

reverberated—left and right—as planes

let slip their missiles on the Overworld.

Huge spires collapse—and tumble on themselves—

towers on towers of the Citadel—

eternal Structures in the Cityscape

of Paradise, and down the Bells—down Time

and certainty—implode, and fall away.

For now great Transcendental forms, and frames

to skeleton a metaphysics break,

crumble, disintegrate: as air raids rock

and craters catch them.

See? Elysium

becomes the crosshairs well (as any camp

or barracks, battlefield or city, home,

cathedral, garden, Dresden, library),

and in the haze of chaos, one for one,

seems wondrous edifice for demolition.

Now, where the missiles struck, I saw the wounds

they left: cold, gaping

of utter black

(as when, in space, some stellar giant dies,

sinking so deep on its imploding self

it’s pierced the very fabric of the sky

with densest nothingness). So was it then,

except in myriads! and all the heights

of Paradise pocked sickly with the rash—

as down into the craters strikes and bombs

had gashed rubble fell to a Void, and Forms

like mortar to the gobbling holes: swept down,

into obscurity.

Imagine wonders…

imagine…shrines (but worth the name), great shapes

fit for the Temple of the Spiritual,

and build a city in your mind of awe.

Dream up into the air what’s holiest,

in structure soaring like sequoia-scapes,

till all the skyline beams what’s dearest us:

our Cause, done cosmopolitan. Build up

the scene

—then throw the whole thing down. Break off

its shoots for losing in abyssal blots.

By this, the Heavenless might gain some sense

of loss, and tally tolls of bankruptcy

by summing measure to infinitude.

For so the City crumbled, sinking spire

by spire, explosion by explosion; planes:

fly-like, and darting to-and-fro; and down

upon the battlefields: red massacre,

red carnage—millions of the Seraphim

hacked, mutilated; men doused with their ichor;

as all the vistas of Elysium

looked seething with the broth of dead and dying,

the dead and dying falling mixed, and lost

beneath the cloud.

Then: tremors overhead…

a bomber swoops!—and, all at once, smoke BURSTS

with rubble from the emerald Citadel!

revealing souls inside… There, in the shell

and ruined room its triggered wreckage left,

crowd multitudes of LORD Jehovah’s own:

the Tribes of Jacob, still at prayer—still true—

and chosen children from an older world.

The floodlights’ blare tore in on them, and seared

their worship red—so that I saw their faces,

saw all their multitude, and multitudes

in hate against them, till I feared what I’d

see next…

I gulped—expecting savagery

to let itself in orgies of the butcher…

and yet

was awed the more

when, one by one,

contingents of re-ordered armies formed

man’s mock-Empyrean.

There, cog by cog,

it rounds the prisoners up, mechanically—

devoid (it seems) of unkempt malice’ rage—

and, man by man, conveys them out apace

like any product on a factory line.

…Amazing, is it not? how men could make

their slaughter art? or (more correct) a skill:

a scientific and precise affair,

with all the nonchalance of business? And

is this not most of all: that as they passed

their stuff along—passed men and women, cog

by cog—conveyed their cargo mile by mile

(out past the frenzy of still-raging war)

and transferred Israel from dust to dust

to hurl all coldly to a distant Void—

is not this something: that of all who worked,

there was no one to blame… no ‘murderer’…

So can six million die, efficiently—

and none who kill consider it a crime.

But all defenses now were lost. The Walls

were breached, and Heaven opened-up. The Hosts

of Angels struggled fruitless—or in heaps—

and millions flecked their corpses on the cloud.

…But where was God?

More blasts! The Gates—

entrance to Heaven—tumble from their jambs,

shatter to colors of chalcedony

and deep jacinth—Perfection’s sardius,

chrysoprasus, and beryl. All these, like gems

of every value: scattered to the winds!

as everywhere rich beauty’s ruinous

and spreads the splendor of Elysium.

So savaged, hallowed-hollowed, Mystery riddled

and wholly scarred with bruises of the Void

and bomb-blotched meaningless, the ancient Walls

and outer Gates of Heaven break apart—

cleave into slabs, and teeter droopingly…

…holding a moment…

—like a man about

to fall—when heart and soul, at strife in dying,

dither to pass for hunger of the world—

and so holds on, with clutching at the chest…

a weeping grimace at the body’s fault…

before a gravity more powerful

(and careless) brings him down for final rotting—

so, billowing down in swollen clouds of smoke

and circled plumes, the ancient walls of Heaven

disintegrated

into ash.

With all

the force of human history they crashed

and shook the Overworld in awful peals,

as though a million bells were tolling then—

the din of every human church at closing—

a cosmic funeral—the midnight hour

of God—and all man’s armies on the brink

to pillage through, as I leapt up, and out

my trembling room before it falls to dust.

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