The birth of the modern world

Here is the bust of the dead man, pupil-less,
white as bleached paper - some might even call it flawless,
but, look here, marbling still shows through. It’s like
the blue veins of aging can not be hidden
even by the sculptor, so what does this mean. Look,
when you take away the multicolored suns
at the center of eyes, man becomes something other,
he looks out at you from some kind of wandering moons,
stuck there, behind a thoughtful perch of brow
bone, and he cannot move. He can only manage to bore into air
with those blanched almonds that rest in his skull;
those eyes that have forgotten the existence of prism, those eyes
That never looked on rainbow or starling feather to swallow
The color or sparkle of feathered star. Colorless, he looks
on the world. In silence, his mouth a barred secret-door
trapped inside a crinkled parentheses. Does the sculptor
Himself know what he is doing when he chisels
The stone to life. Or is the tool the living
God, the splitting atom, the seed heavy with animate potential
spilling over, saying something like: and then there was life

Author's Note

2020