World Culture

The poem, someone quotes
        Mandelstam, speaks nostalgia
for world culture. Which rings true
        to shapeless intimations, cadences
forces welling up beneath the swells

        of centuries, coalescent imperial
cloudwalls, even scattering before theoretical
        winds, sympathetic tsunamis.
Nostalgia for a mythic unfallen, garden
        of single speech, singular ideographic

traced on the vibrating air; but what
        about false nostalgia, nostos
to a household where the traveler
        is as strange as
the swaggering salesmen drinking skins

        dry, summoning another fatted calf?
When I greet you lips to lips,
        is that osculation a posture of body
or society, a myriad of bodies
        jostling, penetrating, pressing

apart? Nature is after all culture,
        or springs from self-same
roots. I turn it over in my hands, a bit
        of soft marble coaxed and buffed
into the forms of the Blessed Virgin

        and her canny son, one raised eyebrow
and blessing forefinger. This is or is not
        every mother, or some savage fetish
to trigger a thousand howling swords
        pillaging and sacking. Today, behind glass

in an endless phalanx of self-same
        burnished fetishes, fiery beneath
the stares of pressing crowds, she is world culture.
        Imaginary museum of ostended
nipples and actors' astral crowns.

 

 

 

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