1.
An architecture of inequity
designs the lower floors of history,
the unchanged, uncountable crypts of misery
where the living and the dead are distinguished by their smell
—one stinks of sweat and shit; one stinks of hell—
and life goes on because lives are replaceable.
Forgotten, those whose years were brief and harsh,
who progressed from the bad to the even worse,
while someone the world would remember was inventing an arch.
2.
Always, the cobbled-over vestiges
whisper to what is now of what once was.
Their only explanation is Because.
The relics of uncanonized saints lie
under our sandals, as we hurry by
toward our goal of pizza in a café.
We balance on the shoulders of the great
and the nameless, faceless hordes under their feet,
whose histories whisper from the cobblestone streets.
3.
But let us not deny the power of awe:
to stand breathless, gaping, murmuring wow
is a modern equivalent of prayer.
We travel across miles and centuries
hoping beauty will knock us to our knees,
lost momentarily in ecstasies.
Is it to SEE we seek, or to be SEEN?
In art’s deep inner stillness do we mean
more than the suffering and brevity of being?
4.
Tourists imagine our lives will be changed
—new DNA, molecules rearranged—
simply by seeing the beautiful, the strange.
In Africa, we tick off The Big Five;
in Europe we visit works we recognize
from schoolbooks. The works of those who believed
in co-creation, working Hand on hand
with the Creator, make us understand
what the sacred once meant to humankind.
5.
Yet tourism can be a way of counting coup.
We e-mail photographs, as if to prove
Kilroy was here, on a Vespa through the Louvre.
Fra Angelico wept. May the sacrament of his tears
open our jaded hearts. No other cures
exist for this contagion of malaise,
except our humble bowing before art.
As they say, art is long, but life is short.
We know we rush to places in the dirt.
6.
Before we take off for the afterworld,
I’ll shape this little verse into a gold
circlet around a beloved pate. Behold:
a priest canonized by secular love!
Let’s raise an alleluia and an ave
for the one immortality mortals have:
art’s imitation life, la vie ersatz.
If a poem has the power to stop the clocks,
here’s to brief timelessness for Abba Jacques.
7.
The beautiful is mass-produced today
as cut-rate replicas for the hoi polloi.
Does assembly-line uniformity destroy
our experience of awe? Yes, the David cloned
moves us less than the one David alone.
Machine-made art cannot contain art’s pain.
Reproductions cannot hold us rapt
like the illuminated manuscript
an old monk drew out of his prayerful depths.
8.
We want to care, but the funereal vase
made centuries ago simply because
someone was loved by someone else and lost,
we look at, and forget. Babylon’s walls
remind us of a trip to Disney World.
Untutored in the art of seeing well,
we gaze at surfaces and eddy past.
Book learning doesn’t change our peasants’ taste,
even though we’re now upper-middle class.
9.
Guidebooks can’t tell us what we ought to feel
in front of Important Works. (Convenient small
full-color photos make it possible
to identify Important Works without wasting our time
on minor strivers.) As a rule of thumb,
however, it can’t hurt to be struck dumb.
The awe of the aesthetic experience,
part of our universal inheritance,
makes us basilicas of reverence.
