Having begun now to burn bright as the fires that bore it, having,
As so many things, become of what it was from the first the apparent
Equal, transformed only through atomization, through display,
Those distinctive signatures of the miraculous and its window dressers’
Ongoing project–Design’s gentrification of a vulgar, impoverished Real–,
Which, on-schedule, over-budget, will spare not one of us its curatorial
Light and the touch, feathered at the edges, of its sentimental reflections,
We’ve been called here today by these contrails’ inscrutable skywriting,
By their invocation of that charred, nameless chasm, that scorched no-
Man’s-land that separates a pictographic glyph’s gape-mouthed gawk
At that thing right there from the disinterested, abstract yawn any alphabet
Would offer in return for such a gauche archaicism, called here to gather
In memory of what by the end of this will have already been forgotten.
***
Whereas the sky was the vault of heaven, and thereby kept God at bay.
***
Whereas the form of God is what stifles and is not spaciousness, not space.
***
Whereas intent on nothing but not waking, I sometimes dream a memory
Like cold, or like the stories we were told about freezing to death,
And how, in the end, it’s supposed to be a sort of calm, how it’s supposedly
Not so bad, though even its dream can never keep the day from coming,
The day that only ever half-arrives but does so all at once: brittle, thin,
Impenetrable, finally, as what now fills what was once the sky,
Our Dear Departed Friend, our friend who grew ill, who grew, in illness,
Less and less recognizable, so that when we thought, as we occasionally would,
To keep the sky in our hearts during the hardly bearable middle of a day,
It was something almost entirely different that filled them then, something
Vague and near, something no longer what could be watched from a distance.