An Elegy For Vonnegut by Andrew Haley

STRANGE PROCESSION (RIP KV)

In the church of the world
Some are guiding the long leashes
Of the animals
Caged in thought
Some are guiding the cages
With antique keys
Hanging on leather loops
Around their heads
Some guide the long night forward
Leading it with crosses
And the oxcarts’ aching axels
Grinding forward
In the loam
Behind the straining steps
Of bullocks
The mute procession of the animals
Marks the earth with holes
The sky is the end of the wind
The wind is the shadow of heaven moving
Over the vast stretches
Where the bodies lie
Where the animals sit down mutely
And mew their final song of servitude
To the night they draw
Over the church of the world

In the church of the world
You are one of many cages moving
An hour of ice in an hour of glass
Your wet eyes and your heart wetter
Wrongs piled filings on the bottom of the cage
Rightness a key whittled from molded metal

Method
Is right
In the altar

The altar shaking
On the planks
Of the oxcart

Dikirion and trikirion flameless
The candles continuously extinguished
Tilting in their brass candelabra
Smoke leading night over loam
Priests nodding the exhausted refrain
To the bullocks’ pace–

“They did not like it here”



Andrew Haley is a writer and translator living in Buenos Aires. His poems and translations have appeared previously in Zone, as well as Quarterly West, Western Humanities Review, Wavelength and Good Foot.