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The Gargoyles Return

Dappled Things

Joseph O’Brien

– to M.L.

This fixation with grotesques’ gross-weight stone
Began with bog and marsh, the search for mired
Delight in clean disgust; rock slime swallowed
By rain-swelled creeks, ooze beading black plates of shale.

In time I took bullet-like between the eyes,
Familiar as scum-skimmed ponds of mossy rock,
The guttural spirits perched in pictures of
Notre Dame, Chartres, Grand Central Station . . .

Fanged and ogling theologians, these—like
Salon stalagmites built up from stone’s drip
Into bodies of beautiful ugliness—
Have hampered nothing in me for my quest:

The dizzy apocalypse of their return
Steeped in malevolence—like ashen crows—
Like gravity’s own loci genii—
They stare down the rain from plinths and parapets.

Joseph O’Brien is a freelance writer who lives with his wife Cecilia and their seven children on a rural homestead near Soldiers Grove, Wis. He prefers Horace in the country to Vergil in the city and Ovid in any case.

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Filed Under: Christmas 2007, Poetry

Mary, Queen of Angels 2020

Purchase Featuring nonfiction from Joshua Hren, fiction from Jennifer Marie Donahue and Rob Davidson and the winners and honorees of the Bakhita Prize in Visual Arts.

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