Memorial Chapel. (Poem).

Memorial Chapel

   We've arrived expressly to be transported
   while we sit stock-still in the college chapel's
   1800 Federal architecture,
   witnessing music,

   Schubert, Bach, Prokofiev, Shostakovich,
   week in, week out, making this room a spare, sparse
   paradise, a garden where sound waves loiter
   rounded to crystal.

   Now, for instance, Beethoven's Grosse Fuge in
   B-flat major scrolls from the quarter's guts while
   listening I study again the names carved
   back of the players,

   marble-clad memorial to the Great War
   dead, the undergrads and alumni who got
   butchered giving Europe democracy it
   didn't desire and

   lie transported off overseas. The Grosse
   Fuge spreads thick, deciduous layers, aural
   flavors--ash, ambrosia--in living ears un
   stopped with the earth, un

   like the ears of Wesley D. Karker, Luther
   Hagar, William W. Waiteskill, Herbert
   Rankin, Talbot Carmichael, Allen Ashton,
   Kennedy Conklin,

   Wolcott Caulkins, Alwyn G. Levy, Howard Thorne, and
   dozens more stone deaf to the music, deafer
   than a post, than Beethoven, college guys now
   deafer than when they

   sat in boring lectures and dreamt that bloody
   high romance, imagined those French jeunes filles, but
   found nothing transporting them, no returning
   even as cargo.

Jay Rogoff's new book, "How We Came to Stand on That Shore, "has just appeared from River City Publishing. His previous poetry includes "The Cutoff" (The Word Works, 1995) and "First Hand" (Mica, 1997). He teaches English and liberal studies at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York.