In a courtyard lit by the sun,
Greco-Roman body parts
Are pedestaled around a tiled pool.
Here, the coiffed head of a woman,
There, a lithe leg or muscled arm,
And everywhere, torsos of either sex.
Beneath a severed wing,
We stand at the entrance facing them,
As if before dismemberment
Our bodies too were part of the exhibit.
From the shadow of a balcony above,
A docent stops to scrutinize.
I cringe.
We dart to a darkened gallery,
Our feet circling a square
To the Monet,
Where our gaze becomes rapt,
Where our posture stiffens to rigor mortis
As we succumb to the beauty
Of a lily in its pool.
From the corner of my eye,
I espy another docent watching.
Rouse yourself!
Shake each limb awake!
If I move to close the circle,
What more am I looking for? Why?
These docents are everywhere,
Standing sentinel in corners,
Or processing through hallways.
Servants of art?
They look like wraiths in blazers,
Ushers in a charnel house.
Once innocent like you or I,
In limning art’s history,
In scavenging its anecdotes,
They failed an epiphany.
Now silencers,
Enforcers of an etiquette,
They serve without parole.
We flee on a lift to the loft.
The opening door discloses
Ruined artifacts of Asia:
The belly of Buddha;
Fingers that insinuate a lotus;
Myriad bodhisvattas
Of exalted countenance,
Re-enshrined in a temple of death.
In their midst,
One small statue on its plinth,
A wanderer,
Scraped, chiseled, sanded,
By a carver’s telling hand.
His gauntness is covered
With a cloak rippled by wind.
It is open, exposing the wings
Of his chest bones.
Beneath its hem,
The delicate bones of his feet.
This carving is the skeletal key to a secret:
Witness how rapt is his face in repose,
And his hands, how they are hidden
In the cloak, too holy to view.
I circle an evocation of a vocation.
What I divine shall uplift and uphold,
Just as a wing takes the wind.
Let us look to ourselves and be gone.
No longer will we linger here,
Gazing after beauty,
Loving these fragments
From dreams already dreamt.
May my own art be a stave
That guides and protects,
For a journey
Worthy of the telling
On the final day of breath.
We descend the marble stair;
See the door and the light,
A stone’s throw away.
Let us go quickly–not a docents in sight.
March – September, 2008
(Alternative Ending. This was my initial attempt to end the poem. I was dissatisfied and tried again.)
He carved this fetish
For the few
Who can intuit what it is:
An evocation of a vocation.
These are the ones
Who wish that they could touch
The wooden skin where it is rough,
Fitting the imprint of his tips
With their own, knowing
They are his son,
His daughter,
Cursed to live likewise,
But beloved by the Father.
Let us look to ourselves and be gone.
No longer will we linger here,
Gazing after beauty,
Loving these fragments
From dreams already dreamt.
May my own art
Be a compass and sextant
That guides and protects,
For a journey worthy of the telling
On the final day of breath.
We descend the marble stair;
See the door and the light,
A stone throw away.
Let us go quickly–not a docent’s in sight.
(Excised between stanzas III and IV)
I pause before a supplicant,
The painting of a vigilant woman
Who holds a lighted taper.
An unseen Divinity
Commands her attention
From its secret place of power,
So that her gaze is forever averted.
What miracle or horror will be worked?
Two centuries hence,
Visitors stand before her image
Feeling uneasy,
As if this were the portrait of a docent
On the verge of her novitiate.
(Excised between stanzas IV and V)
A wanderer woke in the jungle
By a pool teeming with lilies.
Cleansing himself,
He discovered a gourd.
Climbing to his mountain retreat,
He placed it on an altar.
There it remained,
This seed of his art,
For years of his life,
Until a season for carving
Reached its zenith,
And a bud in his soul
Began its burst.
stevengoldenpoetry 