Author's Reading (requires RealPlayer)

for D.S. Carne-Ross, apologies to Sir Thomas Browne

Accustomed as we have become
to viewing what once seemed foreign
with familiar eyes: flying buttresses,
hovering just above the Earth, their strong,
stony wings piled like oars:
or the look-see through a rose
window's kaleidoscopic lights;

And after climbing the broken steps
at Palenque, didn't you wander off
from the group, the guide, behind
a temple to where custodians
of the sacred from year to year
yank back the jungle, the mahogany's
great tentacular roots?

The imagination is an airy element,
the sky a temenos where clouds
perform their steaming, daily orogeny,
now-you-see-them, now-you-don't
gods and goddesses.

Yet how the eye craves geometry!--
So you are hardly surprised when this
sprawled coastal city raises a corporate
temple. Mayan features straddling
the fifty-somethingth floor
of a downtown skyscraper.
"Business adapting the sacred

to its own needs," we say,
thinking the architects wanted
to be pyramidally extant,
fallacy in stone and mirrored glass
that like a kaleidoscope
twists the sky another notch:

What if the sacred were sandwiching business
for its own pyramidal ends,

and T.V. screens shone in darkened bedrooms
numinous as a candle's shadows grazing
the corner icon, sheep-faced Madonna?--

Originally published in Agni. .