}} Cabinet of Curiosities by Marc Vincenz |

Poetry at Sangam

SangamHouse

 










Cabinet of Curiosities by Marc Vincenz

Tidy creatures, suspicious of chaos,
expecting the immutable
order of Earth.  As it is in heaven …

Meticulous gods, librarians
of knowledge, keepers of fine-
tuned natural laws, each thing

filed in compartments, classified,
labeled, dividing space into place
and edible time into minutes,

seconds—which furnish contents
a coherence and definition,
a meaning for everything.

What of a cosmogony that holds
up the heavens, the phoenix feather
and the nodules of a dragon,

the tail of the lynx or the shell
of the scarab—that organized realm
of predetermined sequences,

a museum where all can be seen
with thyn own eyes. The setting
required for any narrative, the scene

of the crime. What a Wunderkammer
on stage for the performance of fear
and desire, an archive of passion

and vision! An enlightened structure
of intention. But what when
the audience has departed?

And what of the endless streams
of water that run through rock carrying
with them the memory of time,

the topography of spirit, under
the borrowed names of ancient sages
who devoured the text in order

 
to apprehend it? That the continuum
of ingrained immortality in the ashes
which are the soil of existence …

A syllogism on which we rely
weary in our loaded information,
weary in our self-inflicted exile.