Michael Kiesow Moore

I
In corner niches, above the singers,
gold angels stand in attendance,
arms uplifted, wings gleaming silver;

spotlights shine on each—
a chorus line of angels.
Angels have never been soloists,

except for Lucifer
who wanted his own aria.
We know what happened to him.

Treble voices rise from out of sight;
crystal tones like pure white light.
The cold stone sings.

II
They sing a Requiem,
music to commemorate the dead.
I try to forget why they sing,

for should I not sit here,
remembering my names?
I am not ready for that work tonight,

the long honor rolls would
take the night to declaim.
The dead know who they are.

I hand the burden of remembrance
to the angels. I give them, too,
my guilt. Is it wrong to want

to hear music instead?
They tell me that this is what
the arms of angels are for.

III
Listen closely: in the language of
the Renaissance, they no longer sing
the melody of the Gregorian line—

unison sundered. Lines of melody
intersect bisect interject; hear
instead the voices blend, landing

at the place of departure,
a new way to express unity.
These music poets,

Ockeghem, Desprez, Gombert,
Tallis, Lasso, and Obrecht—
how surprised they must have been

when sound’s jar crack’d
spilling infinite tonal hues,
light’s spectrum itself too limited

to name them all. Five hundred
years later,we are still writing the
catalog. Lux perpetua luceat eis

they sing: Let light shine upon them.
Tonight’s composer, the Spanish
Guerrero, set the words—

and are they not sufficient
unto themselves?—so that sung,
the words rise incandescent

and shimmer; the angels themselves
hush, the gold ones look down
and attend to the glamour of this

tonal array that sets the bedazzled
Basilica echoing sound’s spilling

echoing spilling

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