OK, and this is a new poem that's
forthcoming in Poetry Northwest.
It's called "Of the Unsolved Problem of the Origin
of the Angiosperms--
the Chicago Cultural Center."
"This hallway is as hush and marble as the room behind
the eyes of Brancusi's 'Sleeping Muse.'
Art deco lamps seep their boudoiresque
glow in slim trapezoids of frosted glass.
Scallops gilded, shackled to the ceiling,
where green veins of marble drip like moss.
Outside, the acid of a February morning
with its costume a brutal cold.
You remember how when you woke you couldn't breathe,
surrounded in the bed by books whose
pages were turning quietly but resolutely into powder.
You couldn't stop it.
Now you see the dust motes stammering in the cliff of air
beneath the Tiffany dome have taken
on the character of light to which you
thought they were immune.
The past's great vault, sheer as breath,
the casualties for just a moment manifest the way
your hand and water might slip across the glass
of a diving bell.
Synapomorphies of the flowering plants, soft parts
erased from the fossil record, the radiant mute space that is
the body of the sleeping muse.
When your eyes close, you see the slush
of constellations above the first flowers opening
140 million years ago."