It seems to me that a lot of poetry comes from not poetry.
Often for me, my poems come from other art forms
that aren't literary art forms, the visual arts,
the kinds of things that we see in museums.
And because of that, a number of the poems in my manuscript
are about paintings and sculptures.
And this one that I'll read to you is called "Museum Frieze."
And for me, I'm attempting in the poem
to characterize the fact that if you go to a museum of modern art
or postmodern art, it's possible to have all
of the museums in one museum.
You have the archaeological museum there.
You have in the layers and the icons
and the images that the artist use, you have the social history
and you have the natural history.
And so there's a kind of kaleidoscope effect for me
in that.
And this poem is attempting to get to that.
It's called "Museum Frieze," and frieze is spelled F-R-I-E-Z-E.
It's that band of stone, sometimes underneath the roof
of a building where there's often an illustration
or a relief.
"Showing the rise and fall of long years
in the daytime, the museum's outer face exists as a frieze.
An angel waves to a crowd of dancers with both wings,
her lips trembling.
Then The Actual shows up as sweet swallows' nests
and silent doorway pockets.
I'm whipped about by wind.
I'm heavy with expectation.
I'm an easily broken private citizen
on a boulevard of groomed poplars.
Soon the high season clientele will
ingest the conceptual enigma du jour served
in a light visual buffet.
It's unclear, for example, in the bathhouse scene
whether two men, half hidden by a third,
are touching each other or themselves.
Or it's unclear in the bathhouse scene
whether two men, half hidden by a door,
are touching each other or a third.
Your own observation might bend to a peripheral view, a slow sex
scene along the river.
This preoccupation with history: a horse world
like a spectral carousel opens a row
of canvas miniatures on the side.
No one knows that this beautiful city
is the model for that beautiful city.
The interval between the lines grows larger and larger
traversing the entire floor until the viewer walks steadily
on the surface of the globe.
The female voiceover declares, I am Adam's sculptor in his dream.
I am the bamboo coverings with black fringe.
I capped the entire tent with finials,
then draped the folds into slow ripples skirting his lagoon.
Because we started out in shadows,
because our mothers hunched and weary looking
plod along the edge, feeling like pioneers.
Because crowds pass, because men gather in harmony
and graze like sheep and fawns.
Because photo and text essays, plant field atriums,
art under siege, and sparsely hung exhibitions
chronicle our own reflections.
Because functional aspects, eating, washing, sleeping,
give way to two views of her torso in private relation
to eating, washing, sleeping.
Because the entire facade must be replaced, several versions,
doves caught in the frescoed reeds
vie for ascendance, Adam's tent as the tentative negotiation
between the sea and the sky, as opulent casino,
as the machete of his nomadic heart embossed
on the blank-th century, grandeur of the city.
Long local breaths, louder in succession,
characteristic of the sleeping man,
Lorenzo on the breath of Flora, Emilio
in a world of blood and white palms, Enrique in the ant,
in the sea, in the vacuous eyes of the birds.
Later that same day, when the Emperor ordered the autumn
leaves to lie down, the execution of the artist shocked
the world."
And in the last line there I adapt a few sentences from Lorca
you might have recognized.