The Gargoyles Return
- to M.L.
This fixation with grotesques’ gross-weight stone Began with bog and marsh, the search for mired Delight in clean disgust; rock slime swallowed By rain-swelled creeks, ooze beading black plates of shale. In time I took bullet-like between the eyes, Familiar as scum-skimmed ponds of mossy rock, The guttural spirits perched in pictures of Notre Dame, Chartres, Grand Central Station . . . Fanged and ogling theologians, these—like Salon stalagmites built up from stone’s drip Into bodies of beautiful ugliness— Have hampered nothing in me for my quest: The dizzy apocalypse of their return Steeped in malevolence—like ashen crows— Like gravity’s own loci genii— They stare down the rain from plinths and parapets.
—Joseph O’Brien
Joseph O’Brien is a freelance writer who lives with his wife Cecilia
and their seven children on a rural homestead near Soldiers Grove,
Wis. He prefers Horace in the country to Vergil in the city and Ovid
in any case.
