Entry 4

In the midst of a city all too familiar with rust, verdigris glows strange in the crepuscular light. I like to think of this bright cyan crust as rust’s counterpoint: where rust is a sign of deterioration, verdigris is a sign of growth, a coat, cover, blanket. Rust is disintegration; verdigris, a kind of blooming. The Statue of Liberty was not always green. Cast in bronze, when it was dedicated in 1886 it was a dark caramel color. Some time after the turn of the century, a patina began to spread over her skin, caused by the oxidation of the copper. By 1906 the statue was completely covered. While Congress authorized funding to repair the statue, the public protested and the Army Corps of Engineers decided that the verdigris, in fact, protected the statue. As a 1906 New York Times article relates, Lady Liberty is “enveloped in a singular mantle of varying shades of light green, delicate white, and a subtle dash of yellow. The whole gives a marvelous harmony of blended colors...as striking as it is unique.”

*

The Porter Angel in Allegheny Cemetery dates from sometime between 1910-1920. Originally a sandstone sculpture, it was replaced by a replica cast in bronze by Brenda Putnam. The androgynous angel stands on the second of the three steps that make up the granite pedestal, long robes covering its body and draping over its feet. You can tell that one of its legs is gently bent, and its torso is twisted slightly to the side. It appears in mid-motion, though it is unclear whether the angel is ascending or descending the stairs. Its head is turned to the side, gazing downward. Its right hand is outstretched, thumb and forefinger almost meeting as though to pluck something out of the air, and its left hand reaches forward toward me. Its wings are outspread gloriously behind it.

We recognize more human than bird in the angel, as though the wings are an afterthought, an idiosyncrasy that just happens to differentiate the celestial messengers from ourselves. Yet there is something of the beast in the angel, something inhuman and wild. The crows, as usual, wheel above me, calling out to each other in their inscrutable, cacophonous tongue. Angel, neither human nor animal, of this world or the next. Messengers of the in-between. We envy their freedom, but relish our own free will. The verdigris softens the angel’s edges, radiant. Unearthly is the word that comes to mind.

*

Rust. I think of the neighborhood of Lawrenceville that surrounds the cemetery. Narrow row houses line the streets and warehouses gape onto a wide network of back alleys, a cityscape largely unchanged since the industrial era. In the heyday of the steel industry, this neighborhood was filled with blue collar workers and manual laborers, the bodies that fed furnaces and sloughed off slag from pig iron. And in the middle of it all, three hundred pristine green acres, crowded with the mausoleums and memorials of the wealthy—including Henry Kirke Porter, businessman and Congressional representative.

Walking the scenic route back to Center Avenue through side streets and alleyways, I come across a shrine to the Virgin Mary someone has set up in their small front yard, behind a rickety gate whose black paint is peeling away to expose the red-brown rot beneath. Electric blue Christmas lights are strung around the altar, flicker on as the twilight deepens. They illumine Mary’s face and outstretched hands, bathing her in blue-green.

In the garden behind her, the daffodils have begun to lift their heads from the soil.

*

Entry 3

Today, I notice the children.

I don’t particularly want to be here. It’s the busiest week I’ve had this semester, and I barely manage to squeeze in this trip on a Sunday afternoon. I timed my visit with the warmest part of the day; though it’s been an unseasonably temperate February, today is just above freezing, and the overcast skies are only just beginning to admit patches of sunlit blue. It’s not easy to spend much more than an hour here today, and I try to limit myself to one loop around the main road.

Of course, this plan fails spectacularly. It’s difficult not to wander, to stray off the path. A toppled piece of statuary catches my eye, or a particularly ornate grave, or the candle-flame of an imported cypress stretching skyward high on a hill, and I have to get closer for a better look.

Oddly, even given my meandering and magnetic wanderings around the cemetery, I’m preoccupied in my own thoughts -- work that needs to be done, errands that need to be run. I’m frustrated with the cold, longing impatiently for the warm breath of spring to arrive.

Until the little graves begin to draw my attention. I’m not sure why they stand out to me. Perhaps because there are so many of them that they have simply flattened out into the landscape. Headstones the size of throw pillows, ledgers only three feet long.

GEORGE JOHN WILKINSON

1887-1891

OUR BOY

Infant mortality rates were, of course, far higher in the nineteenth century. Losing one, if not several, children was far from uncommon. Still, the frequency with which these small graves appear astonishes me. One couple have three children buried beside them, all lost in infancy. I cannot help but imagine their frail bones light as birds’ beneath my feet. I think of spring, of its promise of new life, of hatching and blooming.

A wheel of crows spins loudly overhead. I walk through a clutch of barren trees and more disperse from its branches. I realize that I am the one to have disturbed them. Their caws sound as if they are borne more of annoyance than anything else.

WALLIE

ONLY SON OF

JAMES & LETITIA HOLMES

DIED NOV. 4 1864

AGED 4 YRS 7 MOS & 4 DAYS

I think of spring again, of the lush of summer to which it serves as prologue. How these branches like phalanges will be hidden by a cover of leaves, how we will forget the stark grace of what lies beneath, of what will always remain through the verdant seasons that give way to the flame of autumn, what stays on after everything else has withered. I think of the crows, their proud dark forms, beaks of black walnut, clustered by the tens of thousands among these skinned branches that dare, defiantly, to remain.

We notice the crows in the winter, when the leaves are gone. When they are revealed by absence. When they bloom among the fallow.

LOUISA

DAUGHTER OF

WILLIAM AND ELIZA B. THAW

BORN MAY 10 1842:

DIED AUG 18 1843

As I stand beneath the bare boughs, looking up into the webbings of shadow crosshatching a gradually lightening canvas of sky, I realize that I’m desperately searching for the telltale roundings at their tips that signal their readiness to bud and blossom in the coming months. For a sign of reprieve from winter’s hold. A sign of life.