The Hildesheim Doors
And here I’m sitting on a low stone bench,
but not a bench, I see now—it’s a wall,
an old foundation round a grassy patch
whose center, a six-pointed memorial,
marks where the fringes brushed the parchment scrolls,
then blessed the lips, letting glad voices sing
the Flood, the flames of
sunk in the sea, the fleshy reveling
around the Golden Calf. Half Hildesheim
got flattened by the Allies in ’45,
plane following plane, bomb following holy bomb,
mere weeks before Red tanks inspired the love-
death in the bunker. In the marketplace
timber by half-timber, in full Renaissance
variegated splendor, the butchers’ guild,
a charming resurrection, and so clean
you’d expect the master butcher to be Mickey,
chauffeured by Goofy decked in lederhosen.
But it’s for real, bearing out the lucky
destiny of a city that embraces
its own terrible role in history.
In the southern quarter a host of houses
survived the bombs, their sixteenth-century
frames jauntily crooked, plaster walls whitewashed
spanking clean. Just one building went to
rubble,
this synagogue, burned down on Kristallnacht.
It’s easier to make a memorial
of something that’s no longer necessary.
At Hildesheim cathedral, great bronze doors
one thousand years old spin out the twinned story
of fall and redemption, of fruitful loss
and bloody victory. Their style shocks us.
It’s frighteningly modern: Adam and Eve
fling spindly limbs over their nakedness
beneath the blasted prehistoric tree,
their fingers pointing everywhere to stain
anyone but themselves. They know. That serpent
curling among the flowers like a vine
has lost his voice and can’t plead innocent.
Their round mouths wail in cartoon disbelief
at the rough justice of their sentence, numbered
from Day One. Moony heads smooth as if
new-shaved,
plucked out for shunting down a ramp, they’re tumbled
toward death—for stealing fruit! sun-ripe and warm;
we bear helpless witness. Smiling in wait,
wearing his dark suit like a uniform,
the sexton flips a switch. The lights black
out
and brother kills brother under an eclipse
worthy of a crucifixion. No angel’s
words to Mary, burning through space from lips
to virgin ear, can light these bronze rectangles
chock-full of God’s love, each comic strip panel
a boxcar coupled on a one-way track
to terminal, screaming right on schedule,
rectangle after rectangle in the dark.
Reprinted
from The Long Fault. Copyright © 2008 by Jay Rogoff.