I dreamt I saw the Temple of Concord
Outside a rural Canadian town.
Farmers stood round the temple
Wondering what to make of this…
Naturally the farmer was compensated
For the foreign structure on his land.
The temple, enclosed in clapboard,
A country church and farmers’ market.
But when I drive near that alien corn
I see the Temple of Concord glowing
Against the green, beautiful in snow,
Though no one else can seem to see it.
The poems of the old century hold their magic. “Cemetery in Snow” by Xavier Villaurrutia is such a poem. You can think about the poem several ways but because the subject is so singular it is trapped in the glass of its making. Shake it and the letters will settle back in some insensible way, burying the cemetery just so. The poem was probably not so much a matter of writing as of polishing glass, clarifying silence, making each different letter fall the same way.
Bright figures swim in a Roman bath
Sunk in shadows of an underworld
Neptune and seahorses mid ocean
A boy on a dolphin leaps into light
Mosaic land of impossible stone
Beings trapped in dimensionality
Beings detached from stone
Gods on the surface of a dream
Supine and recumbent statues
Extruded from swampland
Buried like mystery religion
And backward flowing skies
Tessellated spiral lines
Like nets between stars
Multitudinous motionlessness
Oceans of unweighted time
Clearing the silt of words
From the mirror of mind
Eroding the same earth
A mosaic of merchant civilization
Fish and sails wine and grain
Amphorae amphora repair
Open to the mouth of the Tiber
Fishhead man gulping the sea
Salvatore Ala 