Religion, art, and architecture: nothing could
Be more temporary than the permanent.
It would not seem to be a museum, this skull,
This vaulted dome, this house of angels,
But it was. The kind of poetry that attempted
To recreate poetry as a new kind of exercise
In being some sought-after form of humanity
Never tempted me. The grand, Miltonic,
Whitmanic, supercalifragilistic strain grows
Weak in me. No one has ever reinvented
The actual wheel. It’s possible to live, to run
Empires entirely without the wheel at all. It is
What the wheel carries, what pulls the wheel
That makes it, in a grand old sense, terrible.
Was this my plea for the primacy of content?
Not hardly. The primacy of method is more
Like it. Peter the Great collected taxidermied
Trophies that became a stuffy old museum
In the remains of a zombified empire. There
Was nothing too innovative there, nothing
Too revolutionary in the remnants, the usual
Bones and posed hides of bears, Siberian
Tigers, condors shot in romantic America.
Recently, however, new methods could get
Inside the eighteenth-century architecture,
The one, two, and three hundred year old
Feathers and furs. And what had we here?
The disturbers of religion, antithesis of art,
Little signs to decode from the forgotten,
The lost, the temporary in the permanent
That reemerged, having silently endured.
What I didn’t remember, it was always there.
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