I am a sculptor.  Since I was a boy

I have loved the shaping 

Of stone--I have learned

To let its voice speak of

The forms beyond my words.

I remember how it was

When I sculpted a gargoyle

To keep rain from the walls

Of the Cathedral of Notre Dame,

Our Lady, Mary, of Paris.

When the stones were delivered

From the quarry, I arrived early

And chose the best, that I might find

Within it the grotesque masque 

Whose eyes stared out from inside of me.

The stone was hewn from the same quarry

Where Gershom, my mentor, lost 

Both his hands.  That stone that

Twenty years ago took his voice

Still rest where it tumbled, tribute to his silence.

From Gershom, I inherited

His chisels  and mallets,

Exoteric tools of our trade.

How often he has said to me,

"You speak with my voice."

From him I learned 

To discover in silent stone

The character and nature of man;

To know that equal masque of equanimity 

Beyond the sayings of our words.

As I chipped and chiseled  away that stone

A thickened bony brow revealed itself,

A distorted supporter of flesh and hair,

Jutting out over hollow eyes, socketed 

In what I know was once my face.

In the rock, spiraling horns remained,

Reminders that ours is an animal skull

And only by the cones of knowledge

Firmly affixed in our memories

Endures the separation that gives us our tongues.

Muscled arms stretched from shoulders 

Attached to wings, resting their elbows

 On cathedral eaves , hands 

Cupping head, keeping rain from

The image of the Body of  our Savior.

The tongue sticks farthest out of the stone,

Beyond the lips, beyond the face, beyond the horns          

Beyond arms and brow, that it might

Lick the raindrops of centuries 

From the ceaseless cheek of the weeping sky.

But in its thirsty crying out

It will be the first of these distorted

Features to wear away--the first 

Of the stone to return to sand; 

The first of the rain to return to the sea.

And countless drops will wear away

The lips, the brow, the horns, the ears

Until two small hole and two small

Bumps and two eyes that listen without

A tongue are all that remain of the visage.

When the water has severed

The neck from the wings 

And shoulders and begun

To wear away the fragile features

O the temple walls

A cosmic egg will remain

Supported by our muscled

Naming of the arms of the universe,

Our solitary creation of images of our essence

That endures the ceasing of our faces.

Then too that shrinking egg shall

Slip away into the sand and sea

And leave only out stretched  arms

Sans hands, reaching upward 

Into the sun and sky.

I know that after my representation

Of this spouting masque of speech 

By which we cloth our wings

And the egg of our  understanding

Has ceased to know my shaping;

After the elbows too are washed

From the eaves that overhang

The doors and walls; that the Towers of Our Lady shall continue

To guide the people  of Paris.

And someday I know, that just as the tongue

Will be washed from the heart of my

Chiseled face, the sea will someday claim

The stones of which we built our Cathedral,

The rocks we carry to this island in the Seine.