Ulver

Angels go - we
merely stray, image of
a wandering deity, searching for
wells or for work. They scale
rungs of air, ascending
and descending - we are a little
lower. The grass covers us.
But statues, here, they stand, simple as
horizon. Statements,
yes - but what they stand for
is long fallen.
Angels of memory: they point
to the death of time, not
themselves timeless, and without
recall. Their
strength is to stand
still, afterglow
of an old religion.
One can imagine them
sentient - that is to say, we may
attribute to stone-hardness, one after the
other, our own five senses, until it spring
to life and
breathe and sneeze and step
down among us.
But in fact, they are
the opposite of perception: we
bury our gaze in them. For all my
sympathy, I
suppose they see
nothing at all, eyeless to indicate
our calamity, breathless and graceful
above the ruins they inspire.
I could close my eyes now and
evade, maybe, the blind
fear that their wings hold.
The visible body expresses our
body as a whole, its
internal asymmetries, and also the broken
symmery we wander through.
With practice I might
regard people and things - the field
around me - as blots: objects
for fantasy, shadowy but
legible. All these
words have other meanings. A little
written may be far too
much to read.
A while and a while and a while, after a
while make something like forever.
From ontological bric-a-brac, and
without knowing quite what they
mean, I select my
four ambassadors: my
double, my shadow, my shining
covering, my name.
The graven names are not their
names, but ours.
Expectation, endlessly
engraved, is a question
to beg. Blemishes on exposed
surfaces - perpetual
corrosion - enliven features
fastened to the stone.
Expecting nothing without
struggle, I come to expect nothing
but struggle.
The primal Adam, our
archetype - light at his back, heavy
substance below him - glanced
down into uncertain depths, fell in
love with and fell
into his own shadow.
Legend or history: footprints
of passing events. Lord,
how our information
increaseth.
I see only
a surface - complex enough, its
interruptions of
deep blue - suggesting that the earth
is hollow, stretched around
what must be all the rest.
My 'world' is parsimonious - a few
elements which