IMAGINING A WORLD

Uncarload the historied Europe for reassemblage in a white building’s art hogan slit window
to shoot out we are attacked from the north, people in gunnysacks waving old pointed sign things
the Rodin Gates of Hell cheery and festive not putting anyone off plaque saying how he worked on it the
grass watered, watered. Champagne could roll down its face foaming over
hip, shoulder bent away from neck’s semipermanent bubbles no vices only lovers in bronze
which feels empty from lack of a moral position. Hell is not picturesque, we say and
look for our niche, too much out from no creatures hidden in, Mexican folding-door
chapels with dolls and candles, samplecase religiosity our notion, with a carrying handle.
as if hell and heaven gates would be quite like, pastel and golds with touches of
a good red, humanely invitational or confection like a stagecoach in chocolate. Or what
good a bronze shroud, planes of it like the usual cast-paper face one sees as art, dough or latex metal
to resemble Rodin, spare hand for learning buttock, limb or instep so like a
face, all visage to the bronzist. A substance in the metal will be a
local deposit (those Backs, blind to the last one) the idea of a heavy panel not a door
in the meantime naked people should have been allowed to play in the other one generations,
rubbing slightly nouveau ribs and noses bright as an old penny’s initial, pelted
with Tate cubes from rectangular mitrailleuses, not a sculpted rat to be
seen in the whole shebang. Hope built into a monument for those without it jars
the knife half “in” the scabbard one metal, all too obviously disposed to be models
on backgrounds smoothed neutral, vaguely architectural for walls of heated iron
rosily bearing odium so that the doors may be coolest, to the intelligence.

9.14.84