With this in mind, we may turn our attention to the second volume in the trilogy, With the People from the Bridge.  This volume offers us a figure, the Narrator, who suggests a continuous presence although he too lacks a name and does not actually narrate but rather functions as a kind of stage manager and director in the mise-en-scène of the text, assigning other figures their roles and action although nothing approaching drama actually ensues:  speaker tenses fade in and out of the first person, and identities only slowly coalesce or persist for long.  At the same time, Lyacos exercises a firm mastery of these disparate materials; nothing in them seems arbitrary or wasted, and the sense of atmosphere they build is cumulative and compelling.  It is this atmosphere that creates such stability and focus as the poem is willing to entertain, and enables us to consider it as presenting a social image rather than a kaleidoscope of personal extremities.
        
The unifying symbol of the poem is the bridge, a concrete as well as metaphoric image of passage.  As it appears, however, it has no indication of traffic and is perhaps a derelict structure.  The people who live by or under it, like any homeless population, are seemingly cut off from any economy beyond scavenging.  On the other hand, they are not people under or of the bridge, but from it, which implies more than a transient abode.  Perhaps it would be better to suggest that it is a situation, comprised of an indistinct past and an uncertain future, and that the bridge itself is the emblem of a journey with no sure promise of destination or arrival.
        
The 'people' - thirteen more or less identifiable characters, but also assorted voices and presences that appear among them as revenants - are, like any homeless population, living in primitive conditions, burning fires for warmth and using a cut-down oil drum as a table-cum-altar.  But they also have possession of a working television and the cast-off technology of a video cassette, and books and newspapers are occasionally brought in from outside, primarily for fuel.  The suggestion is that some kind of modern civilization is still going on outside, but it is also true that past and present seem permeable, as if time had been beaten flat.  If there is any privileged context, it is the biblical one, for biblical texts are quoted, paraphrased, or intimated throughout the text, and the Bible is the one book the 'people' do not consider burning.  This point d'appui creates the spatiotemporal grid on which the poem rests, enabling Lyacos to move from remote antiquity and folklore through visionary figures such as Dante to the stalled and crumbling enterprise of modernity.  If we're never entirely clear where and when we are, it's because we're everywhere at once, among the living and the dead, all copresent in the matrix of the text.
        
The 'people' who set off on their journey - and the critical Hebraic element here is that of the journey, a progression against all odds but with a destination that, in this world or the next, is not theirs to finally define - have been given a further vision in a Word that leads beyond the Law, but one which clouds as well as clarifies.  At its most exalted, the Christian vision had been one of a kingdom of souls, living, dead, and yet to come, all comprehended in the eternal gaze and embrace of God, but torn, too, by the competing empires of Heaven and Hell.  The vision, that is, was at once unitary and fluid, and deeply penetrated, as historical Christianity was, by the darker intuitions of folkloric myth, of wandering spirits, of vampires, of unseen presences just beyond the campfire.  Christianity had sought to banish or at least domesticate these dead/undead figures, but in its present technobarbaric decay (the narrator with nothing left to narrate, the communicative devices with nothing to communicate), they deeply unsettle us again.  A quotation from Mark 5.9 early in the poem reminds us of the task of exorcism faced by early Christianity:


For he said unto him, come out thou
unclean spirit from the
man, and he asked him;
what is thy name? and he answered
saying; my name is legion
for we are many.  (Bridge 13)


What Jesus seeks to expel here is not a single spirit but a figurative host, and it is not clear how he will prevail.  The dogs whose barking is invoked throughout the poem are symbolic both of the underworld (Cerberus) and of the animal alertness that detects the presence of the fearful and the uncanny; they are, too, emblematic of the feral creatures of social decay.  On one level, indeed, it is possible to read Lyacos' text as a conventionally apocalyptic postmodern one in which meaning is not signified but depleted by broken narrative and repetition.  Speech and action are repeatedly broken off, and circumstances seem to grow progressively more dire.  Fires will not stay lit; wounds will not heal. Seagulls that swoop to peck at exposed flesh seem to indicate a city under a particularly intimate and malefic siege.  But Lyacos' aim is not to depict despair as such.  It is rather, in the deeply Christian signification of the poem, to suggest the possibility of redemption.  Indeed, Lyacos' fundamental insight is that redemption is dialectically entwined with despair, and that one cannot be called forth without the other.  This too is a part of Christian tradition - the dark night of the soul that precedes the moment of grace, of enlightenment and salvation.  In Lyacos, however, such a moment is experienced not simply on an individual level, but as a collective crisis in which personality and community are inextricably interwoven, and each person, even in solitude, experiences in and for the whole.  Moreover, what 'redemption' means in and for a secular society in the present is very much an open question.  The small group of people who live under Lyacos' bridge, largely cut off from contact with an outside world that may only consist of similar, isolated groups, tells us little about what a genuinely sacred community might look like:  you might call them pre-Christians living in a post-Christian world, in which there is a book that may not be burnt, but, by the same token, can no longer be read.   Is there, then, any 'bridge' between the quest for love between individual persons and the potential agape of a community?  Lyacos suggests this, finally, in a latter section of the poem:
        

They are coming, look at the street,
there are already enough of them
down there, look further back,
you see how many there are?
At the end of the street it is full.  Wait a bit.
Do you see them there?
Like a wave that swells as it comes.
Full now.  Here, look here.
A great flock splitting left and right.
Each one gets to his door
knows which one.
There is still something in their minds.
You wanted to go and find them.
But they come and find you before that.
Leave the door open for them to come in.
Listen.  He is coming up the stairs.
Don't stand up.  He is coming.
He came up.  He has come.
They have come together.  (38-39)

        
A "chorus" is speaking here, though the imperative voice appears to be addressing someone in the singular ("Here, look here").  The observer thus indicated sees a great crowd that seems to be forming in procession and then spilling over like a wave, a "flock" that divides at what seems a moment of impact into single individuals for each of whom there is an appointed door he or she finds unerringly. This suggests an enactment of salvation in which the 'saved' community, the "flock," is disaggregated at the critical moment so that individual souls may find their destined way before the reunion of beatitude.  At the same time, however, the journey is incomplete:  there is still a separation, presumably that of the observer, who for his part and in the same instant reaches to join them ("You wanted to go and find them").  But in the divine instant in which act becomes coterminous with desire, the observer himself is discovered before he can reach out.
        
In the last lines of the passage, the observer is again addressed imperatively ("Listen"), but what he is told to expect is not a throng but only a nameless singularity ("He"), who is indicated as simultaneously on his way and already present ("He is coming. / He came up.  He has come.").  The three tense instructions indicate the condition of simultaneity, of time as overcome.  Yet we are not to make the facile assumption that the "He" indicated here is the singular Savior.  The community of the "flock," although it has divided into individuals each of whom has a separate portal, is nonetheless immediately reconstituted ("they" come and seek the observer; it is for them that the door - his door - is to be left open; it is "they" who have, already, found him.)   The observer belongs to the flock, which is incomplete without him; there is no kingdom but that all must belong.  At the same time, however, there is, as Lyacos says, both a column of cloud and a column of fire, a pillar of many and a pillar of one (Z213, 123).
        
Poena Damni is, nevertheless, not the poem of a Christian apologist, but of an agnostic thoroughly permeated by the Christian tradition in its deepest sense, and to the folklore - pagan as well as Christian - that has formed around it as part of its historical substance.  Whether or not we can or will be saved in any eschatological sense is left unresolved; what Lyacos wants to tell us is that we must all be saved - or save each other - together.  Thus, With the People from the Bridge appears to end with its last remaining voice, that of the Narrator, offering the assurance of a resurrection in the flesh:


I will open your graves
and cause you to come up out of your graves
behold I will cause breath to enter into you
and I will lay sinews upon you
and will bring up flesh upon you
and will cover you with skin
and put breath in you
and ye shall live.  (60)

        
On the facing page, however, we read this final text:  "The partially decomposed head of a / woman, stolen from a crypt at / Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery / early Sunday, was found in the street / next up to a man who was subsequently / arrested, Los Angeles police said."
        
This gruesome tabloid bit serves to bring us back to earth, to the abiding reality of human depravity and the distance that separates the saeculum from salvation.  But it is also the poet's reminder that the heavenly company will always be incomplete as long as any member of the human community is left behind, and that the world is the condition of the one who has not been included.


Endnote:
All textual references are to  Poena Damni, The First Death [2017];  Poena Damni, With the People from the Bridge [2014]; Poena Damni,  Z213: EXIT [2016], all translated by Shorsha Sullivan in collaboration with the author and published by Shoestring Press (Nottingham, UK). 

~

Robert Zaller is Distinguished Professor at Drexel University, as well as a playwright and poet, a critic whose contributions have appeared in The New York Times and The Nation and a leading scholar on Robinson Jeffers. He is the author of Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime (Stanford 2012).