CANTO VII: THE FALL
Great plumes of ash and antique powder churned
and filled the air, swelling and rolling—up
and out—and coating all with grated Truth,
as Faust, blazing at army’s vanguard, bellowed
behind to seething fronts: “Now shout!
“and storm!—
for the Kingdom of God we claim for man!—
And know: this figment and its Lord are doomed
to our destruction! Onward!
“B r i n g i t d o w n!”
So all charged wildly in to rape and reap
and burn—to seize Jehovah’s Capital,
and pillage Paradise. Trampling through mounds
of splintered pearl—strewn remnants of the Gate—
the million legions flooded through, and swamped
the vast abandoned square of marble court,
whose huge piazza, snowy-stoned, long spread
her pale white arms to greet the dead, and souls
arriving Home.
Now, loosed inside, they break
to tributary swarms of wreckage. Down
the glowing streets and arteries—which beam
their sunray spokes in all directions—men
careen, and chase the fleeing denizens
of Heaven. Crackling distant fires and screams
from smoke-drowned alleyways engulf the Sky,
and sing their jarring musics down on scenes
of sacrilege and sabotage.
But I,
half-mad with grief, sought madly to escape,
and in a frenzy through the halls of God
ran desperate through His rooms and passageways
in search of any refuge.
But—here storms
a Mechanist—and,
down another: more!
Philosophers at right!
and left!
and guns
down every corridor!
So I drove wild,
and flurried through the halls—through colonnades,
with harp in hand, and outpaced pulse’s tempo:
eager to flee—but to what place, what harbor
from a falling Heaven I did not know…
Where—where was God? my heart demanded, called
for Him—till out my mouth the same call sounded,
and all of Heaven round me, echoing:
Father! Dear Father! Lord—dear Lord! Please!
Help!
And so, from room to room—unthinking, crazed—
I flung myself, calling His name for saviors,
screaming for God amongst the empty stone
(now crumbling all around)…
But no Voice came…
no Answer broke the deafening silence there.
Through all of Something More’s deserted halls
which war had cleared, I found myself alone,
and shorn of Help. Only the echoing death
of something long-important rumbled round,
and in that muffled requiem I fell,
crumpling myself on slats and stones which paved
the vacant Throne Room of the LORD.
In tears
before that Kingless chair, I wept my loss
and ruptured innocence. From time too old,
too distant to discern, I’d held His wall
and fortress spires impregnable—more strong
than any army, any cause or doubt—
and lived in castled comfort, numbed by faith
and confidence that His were arms too large
to reckon with, too much of arms to arm
against…
—at least the hymns and odes I’d sung
were propaganda to that end! My songs
once had the world believe it!
Pious frauds!
Bleak lies for naked gods! and anthems: gild
on kings of air and hollow nations! Faith:
but that a note can strengthen such a sea
of man’s imaginations—earth that pool,
and over liquid fictions sing so sweet
we might make some Messiah walk across,
and yet believe it.
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Never more would I…
no longer could I do it… sing of God
and sing sweet lies. No. I was sick of lying—
and sick of all illusions. Gods …could die…
—but I would not be by the while!
And so,
face red, throat hoarse, eyes raw and wet and throbbing,
I lift my harp, and…
with a trembling arm…
hurl it screaming at his empty Throne!
whereon it shatters into shards.
Then down
I fell, and wept for such a loss, wept deep
and heaving with the deepest loss
…until
a solitary pair of footsteps clacked,
and entered in behind.
…I heard them near…
but would not lift my eyes or body up
for grief, and coldly waited death.
And yet
it wavers…
Probably, those shards told all—
the relics of a shattered faith in songs
with which he empathized—for, finally,
I turned, and, as the crackling fires caught hold,
I read Faust’s eyes beneath the crimson light,
wherein I glimpsed my future.
Up I stood,
and weighing all, I sighed…
But knew.
His gun
he flips around, presenting me its grip,
which, hesitating, I received at last,
and clutched it tight. Heaven was falling down,
and I? I was the poet of the LORD,
but there: no more. My Patron overthrown,
I saw the turning of the war, and turned
myself—to leaders that could answer me,
whose voices, harsh and ugly with their truth,
were audible at least.
For Song was dead.
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But far off now, the Christ, the Virgin Queen,
and most survivors from the war with man
had fled to Heaven’s stronghold—last defense
against the sacking hordes—to Eden’s wood:
a plot enclosed as Zion’s middle court:
its green, its central campus—nucleus
of Heaven’s cell, and greatest cloister for
the greatest Priory of God. It lay
a lush and verdant dark-green garden, washed
with leafy saplings, dew-glazed grass, and slopes
of emerald fronds and ferns in flocks inside
the heart of Heaven.
Deep into that wood,
within the center of the Center, stood
the two tall Trees that once vexed humans’ hope
of total happiness: that arbor trap—
the mortal Tree of Knowledge and, beside,
the Tree of Life. The peaks of both could each
be seen far at the Garden’s entrance gate:
a massive archway. There, the ragged bands
of frightened faces, wounded Angels, Saints
and martyrs congregated—marshaled in
and overseen by Christ himself (who’d lost
the tranquil countenance of Sermon Mount
and wore instead a face so stern to wreathe a whip
for sacrilege against his Father’s House).
All these, beneath the Prince’s aegis, stood
in huddled sobs behind the monster Guard:
two soaring, ancient Cherubim, with heads
of men, bodies of bulls, and flaring wings—
twin enigmatic sentinels, sphinx-like,
and blank-eyed brooding beasts. Yet, fiercer still,
there hung (perpetually swinging up and down)
a flaming Sword: a supernatural blade
ablaze, and turning every way, midair.
This trinity of threat God set to scare
trespassed humanity from treasure chests
of Immortality—when Adam fell:
the obstacles to over-life which man
could never pass (and so abduction-proof
against encroaching human hands). Here all
enclustered under siege, and kept the archway,
waiting as Christ’s now-exiled court …for God.
Yet
He was nowhere… nowhere to be seen.
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The view of Heaven burning stood complete:
a total panorama, end to end
(and weeping eye to eye)—spread out like fire
upon a vista, or a sea. And dull
like distant storms the noise came thundering,
and soft—dampened by air and interval,
and deadened by the sky. The sun was up,
but day was gobbled by the dark—in smoke
that wreathed from Heaven: Heaven conflagrate
…and lost.
Christ stood, and stared far out at it,
pondering Providence just shy of doubt,
till the whole world, sick with the accidental,
writhed eerily, and eager for an aim—
cried desperate to his ears for salves and Saviors—
and medicines of Destiny. So… strange…
he thinks, that this
is Revelation.
Then
he turned, displaying in his look a kind of loss
in sad assurance…
Suddenly—he’s bright!
Ablaze with searing radiance, and bleached
with luminosity. His ocean sash
and crimson robe are gone, and, in their place:
regalia of Messiahship—the plates
and armor of the final Faithful Knight,
lavish with crowns, and flameful in the eye,
who treads the winepress of the Wrath of God—
and on his vesture, on his thigh: “The King
of Kings,” and “Holy Lord of Lords”: the Son;
the Christ; white Rider of the snow-white horse,
transfigured fully for apocalypse
and final holy war.
…When I was young
(not that much older than a boy), we learned
our Bible crayoning colorful, and still,
today, I can recall… those drawing games
in which we painted “Armor of the Lord”—
the Helmet of Salvation, Gospel Greaves,
Breastplates of Righteousness, and all the strange
and martial things to help us learn Ephesians.
…But boys grow up… and what a mockery
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of innocence would it suggest, if now
I said that this was how Messiah dressed?
Is that a farce?
Then it is serious:
what once was dreadful proves quixotic jest.
And what is tragic but a helpless hope?
heroic children with their sabers drawn
to meet the barrels over No Man’s Land?
Now, plucking from the air the burning Blade,
he clutched its fire: Sword of the Spirit, bright
with flame—and only weaponry to serve
against the crude material of man.
And on his arm: the Shield of Faith.
…The Shield…
that dazzling spectacle of heart’s defense,
so potently defiant in its make:
Upon its perfect circle, delicate,
blazed all of Afterlife—the blissful days
in being-after-being—citied there
beside its suburb, Earth.
That smaller town
held in its copper orb worlds upon worlds
of wondrous sights: the coming-ins of eyes
to smiling mothers under light, and hands
of purple to the sky; the dimpled smiles
of bashful, blushing lovers holding hands
in danced delight, or bearing apples off
in woven baskets from the fields; the knot
of war: metal disguises worn by eyes
which saw those-come-in hurting, going out,
and broken on the field; last, purple hands,
age-wrinkled, trembled, folding in to lie
forever still, and folded in the Earth.
But next this busy town, so deftly done
in gold instead, a wider City, higher,
outshone its neighbor-place, and seemed to smile
itself! The Afterlife of Earth! where mothers
who passed are mothers present still! and days
of dancing dance into eternities
of holding-hands, and apples. Lovers lie
unbent from youth-to-wrinkled-hands, but fold
themselves together on the earth to watch
the stars. So all that beaten copper rose
to stronger things of blinding gold, and played
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in Afterlife the deathless world of Earth.
So armed, and brilliantly transfigured now
to battle-god from Prince of Peace, Christ turned
at last to see Ecclesia, and ease
her blinding tears.
With breaking heart he strokes
her grief-wet cheek, and, whispering her name,
says, “Come, My bride… Come come, My dear. Let there…
be no more death, nor sorrow… no more crying…”
and wipes her tears away.
“And yet,” he adds,
“I have a fearful vision worth such sighs…
I fight it, though it stays, and seems to say
…I know full-well Heaven will fade. And I?
“…and I shall die
“and leave you widowed, cold,
and desolate. And one day men will pass
and see my precious Church an empty house,
devoid of life—and everywhere your stones
collapsing, lying heaped in moss, not one
atop the other. Then (if they should stop
at all), they’ll mock your failing ghost and say:
‘This is the Bride of Christ, which is poured out
from cracked, old wine-skins. But… who now of us
remembers Him?’”
He spoke, and dropped his head,
and both stood still, and both looked off in silence.
Jesus wept.
But, over the sloping hills,
which blended gently to the cloister-wood,
mankind now rushes—sated with the wreck
and smoke, and eager for a final force
to crown unquestioned victory! Dim gasps
and muffled shrieks rippled throughout the crowd,
who, at the sign from their Messiah Lord,
retreat now through the wood, as Christ’s white horse
deliberately advanced
—to face the war.
Alone, he musters all his wrath—the Son,
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turned holy Power, pulsing bronze-hued heat
and pouring forth a golden radiance
of armored godhead, idol-like. His plume
of horse-hair nodded terribly on fierce,
scowl-slanted brow-folds—dark with nemesis
and drunk with righteous Anger. Flaming Sword
and planet-portioned Shield of Faith in hand,
he gallops on, unswerving, for the fight,
a glowing Rider over battlefields
of Paradise—like lightning in a storm!
And up he came—as we came gushing down—
to run these grim insurgents from his Throne.
We met upon the hill. Christ raised his Sword,
and mankind lifted guns. Myself—I stood
with them… held forth my weapon with the rest,
yet… could have sworn, beneath his crest, Christ’s eyes
met mine for but a second—long enough
for recognition to express, “You too, my son?”
and mine, as sad, replying with a tear,
read, “Yes…”
For at that moment, Faust and Job
called forth to fifty million soldiers: men
of thought who wrote, and thoughtless men of doubt;
men of the New who casted custom out;
men under chains who chafed beneath the weight
of crowns; and all free-minded men who then
believed them; all the myth-defying men;
and men who simply wanted different myths—
to all these men and women both exclaimed:
“His blood be on us, and our children! Fire!”
“His blood be on us, and our children! Fire!”
And everything around me clouded…
Bullet
on bullet—as the Son surged forth—and we
unloading rounds upon Divinity—
so much, so many (as He gallops toward)
a hot, thick haze of gunsmoke overtakes,
clouding our vision with a kindled fog
as we shoot blindly into air.
Soon all
is smoke and lightning, flashes in the gloom
of red and orange; and everywhere: our shells;
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and everything: absurd; as on guns blare
into an unseen void, beyond which lies
our future.
Now, the wild barrage relents…
the firing ceases, and the magazines
go still… We stand, uncertain, in a mist
before our Purpose—wondering
if It’s dead.
But the smoke clears—thinned like a rotting shroud;
the vapors dissipate, and we can see…
the body of a disappointed thing.
Christ, writhing slow upon the ground—his arm
still clutching at the Shield of Faith, as just
the lonely Earth, cleft from Eternity,
reverberated like a hollow bell
in crimson hands.
And all his side was blood…
Before I even understood, all hordes
around me broke from our fixed fusillade
and swamped the sloping dale! Upon the Son,
like flies upon still-struggling carrion,
the armies now descend—flushed with suspense,
and drunk with blood’s intoxicants—to size
their victim up. I followed them, unsure,
half-hesitant—went down into the vale
with all these hunters of my God: looked out
and saw them triumphing, as now they raise
the Wounded up. With burning Heaven backdrop—
sky dark; sun high—millions seeped into Eden,
and brought him, mocking, through the archway.
There,
where the two Trees, now undefended, stood
and haunted from their heights (though vulnerable),
the one—Eve’s snare: mother of Science—Faust
now viewed with eyes all-whites, and to the crowds
cried: “There!
“To Knowledge!
“Bring him there, and there
he’ll die—vicarious for dogma’s Sin,
and fears of Fire. Die, incarnation of
man’s ignorance, and damned-desires! Die, myth
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and fiction. Man and Truth shall live again:
by the blood shed of gods upon the bough
of Knowledge!”
Then, with all the ire and strength
he had, Faust lifted him, and stood him up
and propped him hard against the trunk; and where
two branches forked to either cardinal point,
he raised his weakened hands—still bleeding out
from Faith—and nailed them shut into the Tree.
At this, the Son at last cried out, and broke
his lamb-like silence. On the Tree of Knowledge
he wept, and, dying, called to Mighty God:
“Father, forgive them! …they would know too much!”
The Son thus left to hang on Nature’s cross
and beam, the army turned to view instead
the other Tree—the midmost-soaring wood
(and highest there that grew): the Tree of Life,
which promised all their Afterlife: all time
in Immortality. Its golden boughs
drooped such plump fruits they sagged the branches down,
and, looking as to quench a primal thirst,
still beckoned to some deepest part of man.
A single taste might render each a god:
some supernatural and eternal soul,
unsuffering, unending ever-being—
for every fruit: a god and heaven raised!
and life beyond the grip of Death.
But now,
instead of harvesting its blooms in heaps,
a torch was set ablaze and lit its leaves.
In one quick rush, the fire flared up, and blacked
the green of all Fertility—and killed
the tree that promised lasting life to all.
The Scientists, the Mechanists, and Faust
all fed the flames, destroying what the God
had kept so safe—burning the Grail, the hope
of all Beyonds from men who’d burned to get there.
But scores cried out who’d lusted for its fruit
(nor fully comprehended yet their war
and revolution’s worth) to scream: “What? What?
Insanity! Give us the fruit! The fruit!
You murder Immortality!” So wept
the crowds at this new breach, and some of us
(myself included) bounded to its trunk
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to try and salvage ashy clumps of rind,
and charred remains of our Eternities.
But no: our task proved barren too, and we
began lamenting with our sooty hands
when stern rebukes from Faust broke out:
“You fools!
Would you now mourn for what you murdered? Look!
We rose to fell these childish hopes and toys
of souls on golden clouds! these fantasies
of blissful-fields-eternal! Heaven falls
to man,
“and man is mortal:
“bear that taste,
that ashen taste—it’s Wisdom’s flavor: tart
but true. Its realization is the fruit
of this: our Revolution!
“You pick thorns
for shriveled berries—poisons lusted for
since fed so long on sugars: sweets—not flesh!
But hear, my rebels! I shall bring you flesh!
Manna for minds and water from this rock
to be the Bread—and river out of Eden!”
With that, he ran toward the other Tree
where Christ still gasped, and twice struck hard its trunk.
Bushels of husky fruit rained down in droves
and flooded at his feet. He threw his cane
and scooped them up, then tossed them at the crowds.
“Now take and eat! Enough of milk and Dreams!
Eat! Eat the solid food that Knowledge bears
and be like Man—knowing that god is dead!”
With this command still ringing in our ears,
we viewed our globes—so plump, so thick and bright—
timid to taste of the illicit truth,
but,
hesitantly,
brought them to our lips…
—L I G H T!—
In a sudden flash it blinds the World!
Tremendous!—horrible!—White Light, whose Source
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is Light—as I had never seen before!
poured forth and searing from the Sky! a bath
of Power in an all-consuming Light!
and all was drenched with Overflowing.
Where?
Where was it flowing from? What was the Orb?
For into Heaven’s skies we dare to look
and see
Jehovah!
There: the awesome LORD.
High, looming up, astride a burning Heaven,
a pale Colossus of Eternity
stares down, above the City: arms outstretched—
in the iconic form—and towering
from torso up like a Great Sphinx, half-man
and half-Elysium. Upon His chest
burned fifty million faces: all our own,
providing Shape its contour; Light, its glow;
and in the compound Person that they make,
make up its soul: atomic essences
and imps in His Imperium. With blasts
of lightning, and deep thunder in His stole,
He broods above, His specter haunting Heaven.
And as humanity falls cowering
below, the Great God speaks (which floods the air
like waterfalls):
“B e h o l d! I A M t h e L O R D!
I A M t h e A l p h a a n d O m e g a. I,
t h e L O R D, a m O n e. E t e r n a l. A g e l e s s. F i n a l.
I A M t h e S o v e r e i g n a n d O m n i p o t e n t.
I A M t h e O n e W h o W a s, a n d I s, a n d W i l l B e.
T h e M a k e r, U n c r e a t e d.
I A M H e!”
And as He spoke, the Heavens seethed, and shook
infernos raging deep in Paradise…
…But…
Faust stood up, as all around fresh-cowed
humanity a hurricane blew wild
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and filled his frock, dancing his coat and hair
like savage flags—and undulating gulps.
Leaning his weight into the turbulence,
Faust stands, and sneers, and looks, that God’s cast light
spreads out his shadow slant elongates: quite
as large as God (but running lengthwise), one
for one (one dark, one bright): both locked in struggle—
upon the verge.
Then Faustus answered: “…No…”
and, biting deep his apple, adds, “You’re not.”
The haunting Giant swayed, His fierce blank eyes
and deadened look unwavering—unchanged…
…but for a single speck of light that was
the face of Faustus, smothered out: one light
extinguished from the God’s composite: one
burnt out, bored in—a single, glaring dot
that blacked its disbelieving.
Legions waited…
when now, against the violent winds, Job stands
and likewise sheds allegiance. “No!” he says,
tasting the bitter fruit of knowing pain
and knowing evil, gulps it down, and screams:
“You’re not!” Then, with his disavowal, dims
a second taper—and unlights the LORD.
Now all humanity grows bold in doubt,
rising in waves, and eager to deny.
From floor to feet they rise, unbowing up,
disgenuflecting—sloughing creatureship
as, to the Sky, they look and state their credo.
So all across the soaring Titan, lamp
on lamp go dark! person by person—fruit
by fruit—as all the beaming elements
in God’s collage are inked, and starry slaughter.
It seemed, I think, like wind upon a lake…
when over tranquil waters blows a breeze
and turns it dark, prickling the skin with chills
and creasing wrinkles on the reservoir:
shivers of cobalt on cerulean.
For through the once-bright body of the LORD
a dimming spreads—spreads out, infectious, word
by word, as every “No!” exclaimed and taste
of fruit eclipses one more face that makes
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His chest, shedding His splendor of that awe
they gave—we gave—and leaves, instead, a Man…
A small Old Man amid an unlit orb,
suspended over Heaven.
Then, I gave,
gave up my soul—or, rather, then my soul
gave in. For, trembling with the consequence,
I looked up at my decomposing God,
and, tasting Knowledge, whispered sadly,
“no.”
Two jets roared angry through the air, crossed paths,
and left an X of smoke above the City…
Jehovah held the sky, stripped bare of Light,
as all the evening rays declined to dusk…
In this red moment, sank the Son of God,
neck bending like a poppy, bowed by rain.
Ruined… But, just before his spirit fled,
“It is finished!” he cried
…and bowed his head.
Then all Elysium was lit again:
brighter, perhaps, than even God had shone!
For mushroom-clouds can light the air so full,
explosions overwhelm, and make us see
how past all gods—or devils—men can be
when they aspire. For on the peaks of Heaven
each jet let detonate the Maker’s dust,
the fundamental elements of Earth
and all the Cosmos: split; riven in two;
and what thin veil still separated man
from playing-God: torn lengthwise, rent asunder.
In two colossal blasts, Elysium’s
great crystalline Cathedral was erased:
obliterated; funneled up, away
in ash and vapor: cast into the wind,
and all the remnant emerald shards too big
to be negated flung in diadems
of burning shockwaves, layered ring on ring.
Up, up the blazing willows bloom! with stalks
of fire, and flowering a conflagration—
two brilliant pillars bearing pediments
of flame, and messy petals in inferno.
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But all of it unfurled. The fireball flared,
and all the smoke and ash, imploding, curled
upon itself—that as the blast concludes,
its gash appears:
the greatest cratered Void
the soul can fathom, tearing through. A Hole…
Where Heaven stood, abysmal emptiness
now glared: a vacuum in the Overworld,
sucking it down.
Down! down! the whirlpool Void
now draws! The ruins and the clouds—dragged down!
Domes broke to bricks, and Gothic spires collapsed
to the deep jerk of the voracious pull—
which gobbled everything. Its yawning gulf
spread out, and ate the flood, misty and wild—
sucked to the vortex like a galaxy
of dust, or some celestial hurricane
with pupil-eye of Nothingness. To loud,
horrific rumbles, all was thrust to jilt
and gyre, sucked to the rift—thrown, gurgled down:
Elysium, on fire. Steam, fog, and smoke,
and crackling thunderheads of billowed gloom,
and all the treaded realm of haze, and film,
dark nebulas, and blood-stained brume, and fields
of vapor where the Angels lay, men too—
collided into chasm: collided, and
passed through: to some deep nether-hades, lost
beyond eclipse.
All that explosion spared
broke up, and sloughed away: great colonnades
wrenched down, and everything obliterated.
And in the tortured air: the LORD Himself,
fighting tornado currents like a ghost:
His million darkened faces fluttered off
into the gorge, a house of cards—to leave
but a ripped King, reluctant though deposed…
We watched, frantic and fearful—pulled in close
through roaring winds, and huddled desperately
round Golgotha. For there, warm Crucifix,
the Tree of Knowledge held: stood firm against
descending Heaven falling into Hell.
Downward She goes! tossed marble, spires, and domes—
and the LORD God, battered inside the cyclone:
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drowning.
…Who knows the frantic fear of one
caught hopeless in the undertow… (if he—
from boyhood—doyen of the sea, should sink
in well-loved channels: surf and currents known
from youth, but suddenly turned oddly mortal)
…who knows that face—surprised by death and change—
will have some sense of that wild wonderment
which now flashed over Yahweh’s. Groping mad,
in an incredulous new urgency,
He writhes, and fumbles as the whirlpool winds
pull down—till all the bricks and cloud are gone
and buried lies Elysium.
But He
remained—lone Relic of that murdered Land—
and struggled on the precipice, His back
pulled hellward by the final draw, and all
Time, Reason, Change, and Freedom, Hatred weighing.
Then,
finally…
He gave
slipping from verge
to nothingness, with nothing more to save Him
from chasm on chasm of ponderous descent—
a Fall to such eclipse!
So down He went,
clawing the air, and His deep-crimson robe,
wind-drunk with waves, endlessly falling, falling,
and falling into darkness from the stars.
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