Two Poems by Erin O’Luanaigh

In the Morgan Library

for Ange

The slim captives behind the lattice cage
peer out from a world of steel and Pullman cars,
of red damask, slightly singed by lit cigars,
of the marble, oak, and gilding of the age.

After a trip to Edith Wharton’s Mount,
my week’s assumed an accidental theme,
as if I arrived in a cloud of ermine and steam,
and you, perhaps escaping some Polish count,

met me for a turn about these shelves
and news of the Van der Luydens or Lily Bart,
as we study the Gutenberg, the objets d’art
of noble provenance. Our fantasy selves

have nothing on the one constructed here:
the Tudor tapestry above the fireplace,
the honeycomb vault of famous men encased
in roundels and lunettes lend a veneer

of eminence to Morgan’s nouveau riches,
as do his volumes from the French (Montaigne,
Voltaire, Balzac, the Fables of La Fontaine
with the frog who puffs up bigger than his britches),

manuscripts from Amsterdam and Venice,
and German philosophers kept under glass.
To ransack Europe is to purchase class:
Wharton built a French chateau in Lenox,

Morgan, born in Connecticut, died in Rome.
We two—Isabel Archers, Daisy Millers—
speechless with splendor, pass through the pillars
that shoulder the foyer’s Raphaelite dome

and onto Madison, into the present cold.
We search for a bar to soften the chill
of our own allusions (and a mounting bill),
old-fashioneds in our tumblers glinting gold.

Skyscrapers

Our ugliness is beside the point,
our inhumanity pleases for its
own sake. What use, in fact, is
pleasure? What use the trellis
or parterre, except to trim the
aesthete’s lapel? No, we are not
your Georgian terraces, as wide
and columned as cakes, we are
not your cow-eyed Victorian
manors, your Federalist squares,
your Queen Anne’s quoins, your
golden-ratioed minarets, turrets,
bell-towers, or dreaming Gothic
spires… We have no use for
rustication, for vermiculation,
for cornice or pediment, for dog-
tooth, bead-and-reel, or egg-and-
tongue, for frieze, for mullions
with their ball-flowers, for scroll,
gargoyle, acanthus, or rosette,
we of the steel frame, the bundled
tube, the concrete slab, the virtue
of size, the pissing contest with
the clouds, the iron cage, the cold
hard facts, the powers that be,
the blank slate, the eyeless needle.

Erin O’Luanaigh’s poems appear or are forthcoming in The Yale Review, AGNI, The Southern Review, 32 Poems, Subtropics, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. She is a PhD candidate in poetry at the University of Utah and co-hosts the film and literature podcast, (sub)Text.