Spolia
What remains for me: your books, war
relics, and photo albums.
With your books, you were quiet.
Trawling their depths
for underlined passages, marginalia,
I found only the cold
Victorian inscription from your father:
Many of my sentiments are stated herein.
The relics: a variometer plucked from a German fighter,
the face marked Steigt and Sinkt. The back is stamped
Dresden, from which protrude,
like arrows in St. Sebastian’s side,
two aluminum tubes, one for each word.
Puffing one sends the white needle dancing.
Another: the hub from the yoke
of a B‑17, gold Art-Decco inlay on black,
the ‘O’ in ‘BOEING’ with outspread wings.
Of the dozens of photographs,
I begin with one: you and your squad
before L’Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel,
unknown to me as the identity of your grim
mates. Modeled after the arch that threads
the Colosseum and the Palatine, the original
composed of spolia, reused
fragments of other buildings.
A column from the arc balances on your tilted crusher cap.
I follow its line upward to the looming quadriga,
horse heads dissolving in the sky,
legs flattened against the chariot.
I look again, your body against the gray
of Paris, imagining the moment the shutter
closes, as you are turned in her direction,
thinking of the Winged Victory of Samothrace
absent from her perch in the Louvre.
A museum without
its headless goddess.
It was said that when she was returned
to her post atop the stairs, her marble
wings could be seen trembling.
~
Grandfather Knocks on the TV Screen as a Ghost in the Machine
Some mornings, crows congregated
in our backyard, their haunting
iridescence against the green
lawn and sharp annunciations
piercing the walls of the house.
My mother, singing quietly to the tune
of Cops, always gave them a smiling
glare over the rim of her coffee mug,
Oh, there you are you
Bad boys, bad boys…
Years later, this theme song played
in the drunken glow of the TV
as the name of your hometown appeared
on the screen and then,
the door of your boyhood home
came into focus across the hood
of a police cruiser.
I turned and watched the blue light
spasm on the tarnished brass
disembodied door knocker
resting on my bookshelf,
bearing our surname —
given to me after you died —
removed from your door,
the very same door on the TV screen,
fifty years earlier.
~
Ramblin’ Jim and Cow Having Eaten Up Canaletto
Jiří Kolář freed a cow
from a painting with a scalpel,
put her out to pasture.
Her absence frames a famed
painting of a Venice
canal by Canaletto.
Façades in shadow fill
her voided loins,
udder dark
with clustered gondolas.
A lone window
where the bridge of her nose was.
Ears now spread like an angel’s
wings perched on a parapet
against a blue sky. A resting
mast, occupies a front leg,
the X‑ray of a vanished bone.
*
In a photo of my great-grandfather
and his trotter, Ramblin’ Jim,
the horse is in profile,
coat gleaming like wet ebony.
Jim’s Stygian shadow folded
into the foreground as if his image
had been cut from the dirt
of the Great Depression by Kolář’s blade,
hinged at the hooves,
and rotated to the vertical —
my great-grandfather holding
the bridle of a paper horse
on the edge of an abyss.
~
The Hall of the Ambassadors — Distilled
O is for ever and for ever
round and windows
no God.
Ice over doors of the enemy,
fall under stars.
O praise, for ever.
O the tanks for ever,
nag with praise to God,
his wing on us, slam.
And there is no con. &
on the wind, our warlike
God over-endows.
And there is no con. &
on the way, in a trance,
flow ions in prose.
I remove all the effects
of these sentences,
from the Korán,—
I flee for refuge,
of the only¬
Niche left: —
By the rising moon
she heweth him
with dark Heaven
and spread him
[in wicked piety],
there is no Deity
but ah!
*
The script is repeated.
~
The Inverted Parabolic Curve of a Dying Boy On a Dirt Bike
Willows carved in stone vie with winged skulls on gray-boned
slate. From the low light of the dining room, I watch
shadows flit and fold bleak faces into a cold
plate of scales. These cemetery witnesses catch
sighs of mufflers drifting past, bright below break-lights,
snow dyed red. Shy cherubs and long-toothed death’s‑head grins
disguise their joy as the cops read the boy last rites.
Now, I slow my studies of the Sumerians,
abacus-bearded Assyrians and their dead
stares from the pages, moments ago the boy flashed
callousness on his bike. Chased by cruiser blues, dread
rose and a mailbox made him into a dying
flare that hit halfway up a telephone pole, dashed—
throes of death, brain swollen, four-stroke engine sighing.
~
Andrew McLellan holds an MFA in creative writing from Queens University of Charlotte. He was a visiting professor at both the University of Tennessee and UNC Charlotte where he taught architectural studio and history/theory seminars. His writing and collages have been featured in books and publications including Collage and Architecture (Routledge, 2013), Confabulations: Storytelling in Architecture (Ashgate, 2017), and the Journal of Architectural Education, 70:1 (March 2016). His poetry can be found in Temenos and MORIA.