The Lives Objects Outlast. On Abraham Terian’s Phrasing the Arts

SEPTEMBER 14, 2026, ASHOT POGHOSYAN, FRESNO, CALIFORNIA, U.S. CORRESPONDENT, YEREVAN ONLINE Mag.

This article is also available in Armenian.

An old man pulls a quilt over himself. Its patches come from dead women’s clothes. The women are unnamed. Their clothes still keep someone warm.

The quilt appears near the end of Abraham Terian’s Phrasing the Arts. Earlier, he has lingered before a Pompeian mirror and a broken marble frieze, looking for the people who once touched them. Much of what he wants to know has disappeared. The surviving surface can tell him only so much. He keeps looking.

In his preface, Terian traces his studies through archaeology, biblical theology, classical philosophy and Armenian literature. He calls the collection “a book of maps” of his search for transcendent realities, then describes himself as a “doubting believer.” The traditions he knows so well do not always help him understand what he sees. A poem can begin in exaltation and leave him doubtful beneath a silent sky. (Preface, pp. xiii–xiv.)

“Pompeian Mirror – AD 79” begins with a museum card:

    So read the card in large italics,

    but not a word about the girls

    who searched the depth of their eyes

    – their countenance after the tears –

    and lightly stroke their braided hair.

    Of charming looks and their imprints

    – brief moments of vanished tenderness –

    traces are left here and there:

    voided details in the turquoise stains,

    in the whitish brushwork of Vesuvius.

    (p. 52)

The card has done its job. Terian wants something it was never meant to supply. He imagines the girls examining their faces after crying, touching their hair. He leaves the cause of the tears alone. They keep that much privacy.

Notice how little he invents. A look in the glass, a hand to the hair. No biographies fill the space around these gestures. “Vanished” and “voided” keep the loss before us. There are stains where the poet would like to find faces.

Then Vesuvius supplies the “brushwork.” The phrase catches a lover of painting admiring a surface left by destruction. It is beautiful and uncomfortable to read. The girls have disappeared into the very colors that hold his eye.

In “Ode to a Piece of Marble Frieze,” he wants to put his hand on the carving:

    Fragment of shattered pieces,

    I like your broken hoofs still kicking

    though the rest of you is forever gone,

    the rider long dead. This museum

    your burial ground and I a mourner

    my lowly respects here to pay. The guard

    won’t let me touch where your sculptor

    had touched, but only to look

    at what he never saw – your mortal wounds,

    the way you lie in state.

    (“Ode to a Piece of Marble Frieze,” p. 51)

The sculptor’s movement survives in the broken hoofs. The sentence follows it for a moment before coming up against the missing body and the dead rider. Terian has come to admire the work and finds himself paying his respects.

The guard prevents him from putting a hand where the sculptor put his. Kept at a distance, he sees something the maker never saw: the wounds. A later viewer has this terrible advantage. He knows what happened afterward. The museum preserves the wounds along with the carving.

The collection opens on a New York street corner. In “The Steel Drum,” a musician holds his sticks like ceremonial crosses. His instrument becomes an inverted bell, then the upended dome of a miniature cathedral. The comparisons grow from the shape of the drum and the work of his hands:

    As celebrant he chimed

    this inverted bell, censed

    around this upended dome

    of a cathedral in miniature

    where angels descend, enamored,

    to be baptized by human hands

    in such a stainless bowl.

    (p. 1)

The angels need something the drummer can give them. They descend to receive it. “By human hands” changes the ceremony: the musician has become indispensable to heaven. Terian spends his religious vocabulary freely here, but the playing does more than fit the comparisons. It makes him imagine angels awaiting a human blessing.

On Mount Sinai, the sacred vocabulary finds less to work with. The mountain’s granite heart remains untouched by the people climbing it. Moses and the mystics pass through a landscape that does not acknowledge them. The moon seems ready to whisper that the journey is a dead end even here. “Sinai Lunaris” closes with two stanzas:

    No guardian angels,

    no whispering trees –

    just the silence of the stars,

    the gasps of those able to breathe.

    The moon keeps staring at me

    – doubter that I am –

    wanting to cry out

    “I’ve seen many a Moses here.”

    (pp. 83–84)

The gasps cut through the grandeur of the place. We hear the effort of climbing. No voice answers it.

The moon’s final words seem devastating until we consider who supplies them. The speaker has imagined the moon speaking. He cannot claim even its indifference as a verdict. He is the one who makes it speak, then has to listen to what he has made it say. The climb has brought him no nearer to an answer.

“Rebirth” returns to a holy place through family memory:

    Years ago my father served at Saint Mary’s Tomb;

    he waved the censor and chanted loud

    and often out of tune.

    Oft did my mother pray at Saint Mary’s Tomb;

    she muttered Psalms, then kissed every frame

    and crossed herself again and again.

    I lingered today near Saint Mary’s Tomb,

    down Kedron Dale – where time stood still –

    and watched a stork fly overhead.

    (p. 78)

The father’s missed notes let us hear him. Terian remembers the voice as it was, with an affection that has no need to improve its pitch. The mother’s devotion is just as bodily. She kisses the frames and repeatedly crosses herself.

The son watches a bird. He occupies the same three-line space as each parent; the form gives him a place in the family without requiring him to repeat their gestures. The tomb’s name holds the stanzas together. Within that repeated setting, each person does something different.

The title invites us to look for rebirth. The last line leaves the stork in flight. Terian has inherited the place and the memory of what his parents did there. He does not have to turn the bird into an explanation of his own presence.

Love also unsettles the learning he brings to a poem. In “Reality,” the beloved enters Plato’s cave:

    For long I was in Plato’s Cave

    and shadows were all I could see

    until her shadow fell on me.

    Whispers were all I could hear

    until she said something on love,

    then the real world dawned on me.

    (p. 60)

“Shadows” becomes “her shadow.” The whispers give way to something she says. The vocabulary hardly changes, but the world acquires a person. Her shadow remains the means by which she first reaches him. It need not disappear for him to recognize what is real.

Terian can be happier, and less philosophical, with the contents of a cupboard. Here is “Greek Isles”:

    When opening the linen closet

    where most colors come to good effect,

    the folded sheets and pillow cases

    appeared as roofs in the Greek isles,

    the towels smelling of sunshine.

    (p. 42)

The folds give the eye its rooflines. The ending works through smell. A little extravagance has come from things already at hand. The towels remain towels, and the pleasure of opening the cupboard has grown.

Finland, Terian tells us in the preface, is the country of the woman he loves. Its landscapes carry memories of a shared life. (Preface, p. xiv.) In “One Summer Night by Ylä-Kintaus,” he is leaning against a boulder, thinking of her:

    Still here, leaning on a boulder by the lake,

    contemplating the laws of nature, the distant past,

    reflecting on her name, on long-term love…

    Once more I’m singing the joys of yesteryears

    with added thoughts divined in my mind

    with imperfect certainty – a long-drawn dance.

    The lake keeps reflecting my muted thoughts,

    throwing them back to me to sing out loud,

    my hushed thoughts floating like long-day plants.

    Past and present are losing their tense…

    The sun hardly set, light turned to colors,

    the lake into canvas, the shore a long-run frame.

    Now I’ll be singing till I can’t.

    (p. 24)

“Still here” sounds like the resumption of a conversation. “Once more” follows, carrying an earlier happiness into the evening. By the fourth stanza, past and present have begun to lose their tense. Memory has disturbed the grammar of where he is.

The last line stands apart. After the lake has become a canvas and his thoughts have floated on the water, Terian stops on a sentence anyone could say. “Now” brings him back to the evening. “Till I can’t” admits that his voice will fail. For the moment he can sing.

Terian can also reach too readily for a goddess. In “Goddess of a Kind,” Aphrodite and the language of pilgrimage tell us how much the speaker wants to adore. The woman herself remains hard to see. We hear the father in “Rebirth” more clearly through a few missed notes than we see this beloved through her divine comparisons. Some of the collection’s exalted language has this weakness: admiration arrives before a person has emerged. (p. 54)

The ashtray at the end of “Table for Two” is welcome. An overheard dinner conversation has taken in profound questions, hope, myth and a cosmic dance. Then someone offers the ashtray. People discussing the universe are still sitting at a table, smoking. Terian can enjoy the talk and hear when it needs interrupting. (p. 18)

In “Nursing-Home Notice,” he asks for quiet:

    Please be quiet in this neighborhood,

    there are angels between here and the sky.

    Only whispers in this sanctuary.

    Hold nothing holier than the human soul,

    the common in human feelings from of old –

    more sacred than primeval rock or paradise.

    Just observe the rooms, items, the aged,

    a library of hidden documents, fragile,

    contents concealed within the covers.

    (p. 65)

The polite opening belongs to a public notice. By the second stanza its demand has grown. A poet drawn to holy places asks for greater reverence toward the people in these rooms than toward paradise.

His library is still alive. A visitor may see the possessions and learn little about their owners. “Fragile,” at the line’s edge, belongs to the documents and the bodies. Their contents may remain concealed. They still require care.

The metaphor brings a scholar’s habits into a room where they might be of use. He has spent years attending to records that survive their makers. Here are people who can remain unread while they are present, among their things. The poem asks us to stay with them.

In Katajanokka Park, the poet is less ready to listen. Early in his walk he notices two drunks “for whom no one cares.” Later, someone may be trying to speak to him:

    By a red pole

    where dogs do their usual thing

    I faintly hear what must be “hello”

    as someone greets someone

    someone talks to me more than I understand

    and more than I care

    maybe he’s drunk

    (“A Stroll in Katajanokka Park,” pp. 28–29)

“More than I care” catches him. He has recognized the neglect of the two drunks and now admits his own lack of interest. “Maybe he’s drunk” supplies a possible reason to leave the encounter there. It is a guess, not knowledge of the man.

The repeated “someone” keeps the exchange indistinct. No person comes fully into view. The speaker records his part in that failure, and later includes himself in the human parade he has been watching. He has no exemption from it. (p. 30)

Read that admission beside “Hold nothing holier than the human soul.” Terian has left both statements in the book. He knows what attention requires and what it is to withhold it. The distance he finds before the Pompeian mirror exists here too, within earshot of a possible hello.

“Grandpa’s Bedtime” brings us back to the quilt. The stanzas settle toward sleep, each letting its solemnity subside:

    Grandpa spoke

    of a mighty hand

    that could lift him up

    at any time

    to where Elijah lives

    or to Abraham’s lap –

    wherever.

    And with such thoughts

    on the natural order of things

    he went to bed

    much the same way

    as one who goes through life

    without a title role,

    somewhat disappointed

    yet reconciled –

    be that as it may.

    He pulled over his quilt

    patched together

    from tattered remnants

    of dead women’s clothes –

    whosever.

    And as he fell asleep

    like a wintry cat

    he faintly prayed

    that time will proffer

    an exclusive offer

    for the elderly –

    whatever.

    (pp. 91–92)

The old man has lived without a title role. “Somewhat disappointed” is all the complaint we get. “Somewhat” leaves room for disappointment without turning the whole life into a tragedy. He is reconciled enough to go to bed.

He can entertain the prospect of a mighty hand without deciding where it will take him. “Wherever” leaves the destination open. “Be that as it may” puts aside the assessment of his life. These small verbal shrugs allow him to go to bed without settling everything first.

“Whosever” leaves the women unnamed. Their clothes have been taken apart and stitched into bedding. The poem makes no attempt to reconstruct their lives from the scraps.

In the museum, Terian wanted to touch where the sculptor had touched. Here the remnants of other lives are already against a living body. Nobody has to interpret the quilt before the old man can use it.

The last stanza lets him bargain a little. An “exclusive offer” sounds like a concession for older customers. The phrasing is funny, almost embarrassingly ordinary beside Elijah and Abraham. Terian leaves it that way. The old man hopes time might have something left for him, though he is already falling asleep like a cat.

The poem grants him the privacy of that unfinished thought. He need not become wise enough to reassure the reader. Terian leaves his small bargain with time alone.

His prayer trails off into “whatever.” He sleeps under the dead women’s clothes.