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Sharon Kourous reads
About Time
in RealAudio format.
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Pollution of the past eats away English Monuments: Crud... is eating away some of the country’s most cherished monuments... the dark, grimy crust on many of those buildings is composed of the byproducts of coal combustion...
—
Toledo Blade
I
Time’s efforts at acquiring surface or
entering the stasis of matter, erupt now and then
and graze the sky in steeple, rectangular
clock tower, skyscraper, or pillared parthenon.
And with a wry twist of cosmic comic perspective,
these acquisitions of earth’s museum arrive
at a point (time’s antithesis) where collective
layers of carbon residue manage a slime
which destroys ’em. The layered coal
where time first knew itself, those shoals
of seasons, wanted out from the bowels
of dark lack; exchanged heat for the whole
shebang. The industrial ages arrived: revolution.
And filled the air with time’s ultimate solution.
II
These steeples are the quarry’s opposite,
and snag bits of sky as though rectangular
were mankind’s best habitat
in which to understand himself or capture
a bit of time in which to hide
—or pray, and come at last
to perhaps prefer
the liquid light of lakes. Outside,
the tall cathedral’s gone green, unsure
of distinctions; and green moss hides
the box that man built as a cure
for lonesomeness. But water glides
and smoothes the quarry’s severed sides.
III
Man, busy at his monuments in stone,
invented the quarry, cathedral’s opposite,
where light, unstained, filters through the long
liquid aisles where fishes wait
in silver innocence. The carved block rises
against the patient sky: rectangularity
lifts up from the curved uncarved valley
as though to angle cloudshapes from the skies.
These old cathedral towns nestled in the folds
of older hills announce an older desire
—while the serene fish avoids
the lure,
knows nothing of time save generation; holds
to the deep place. And on cathedral spires
collects the residue from which mankind aspires.
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