Memorial Chapel.

AuthorRogoff, Jay
PositionPoem - Poem

Memorial Chapel We've arrived expressly to be transported while we sit stock-still in the college chapel's 1800 Federal architecture, witnessing music, Schubert, Bach, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, week in, week out, making this room a spare, sparse paradise, a garden where sound waves loiter rounded to crystal. Now, for instance, Beethoven's Grosse Fuge in B-flat major scrolls from the quarter's guts while listening I study again the names carved back of the players, marble-clad memorial to the Great War dead, the undergrads and alumni who got butchered giving Europe democracy it didn't desire and lie transported off overseas. The Grosse Fuge spreads thick, deciduous layers, aural flavors--ash, ambrosia--in living ears un stopped with the earth, un like the ears of Wesley D. Karker, Luther Hagar, William W. Waiteskill, Herbert Rankin...

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