t e r r i b l y  c u n e i f o r m

This is your museum of stones, assembled in matchbox and tin,
collected from roadside, culvert, and viaduct,
battlefield, threshing floor, basilica, abattoir,
stones loosened by tanks in the streets
of a city whose earliest map was drawn in ink on linen,
schoolyard stones in the hand of a corpse,
pebble from Apollinaire’s oui,
stone of the mind within us
carried from one silence to another,
stone of cromlech and cairn, schist and shale, hornblende,
agate, marble, millstones, and ruins of choirs and shipyards,
chalk, marl, and mudstone from temples and tombs,
stone from the silvery grass near the scaffold,
stone from the tunnel lined with bones,
lava of the city’s entombment,
chipped from lighthouse, cell wall, scriptorium,
paving stones from the hands of those who rose against the army,
stones where the bells had fallen, where the bridges were blown,
those that had flown through windows and weighted petitions,
feldspar, rose quartz, slate, blueschist, gneiss, and chert,
fragments of an abbey at dusk, sandstone toe
of a Buddha mortared at Bamiyan,
stone from the hill of three crosses and a crypt,
from a chimney where storks cried like human children,
stones newly fallen from stars, a stillness of stones, a heart,
altar and boundary stone, marker and vessel, first cast, lode, and hail,
bridge stones and others to pave and shut up with,
stone apple, stone basil, beech, berry, stone brake,
stone bramble, stone fern, lichen, liverwort, pippin, and root,
concretion of the body, as blind as cold as deaf,
all earth a quarry, all life a labor, stone-faced, stone-drunk
with hope that this assemblage, taken together, would become
a shrine or holy place, an ossuary, immovable and sacred,
like the stone that marked the path of the sun as it entered the human dawn.

The New Yorker, March 26, 2007

Theory of Beauty
(Third Avenue)

Thirty-seven clocks in five tiers.

Sunset, end of a mild afternoon
the hand of winter’s never quite let go of.

Mantel, cuckoo,
rusticated, ormulu, glass-domed, moving brass balls and chimes,
porcelain, French clocks with bronze figures,
thirty-seven, ranged in the shop window,
not especially attractive,

none fine, none precious,
even to my taste individually desirable,
but studying them, then turning away

to the last warmly tinted but almost heatless sunlight,
the buildings ahead in silhouette, and then
the urge to turn back to the stepped rows

and suddenly the pre-eminently important thing
is their fulfilment of the category clock,

the remarkable divergence of means
of occupying that name, honouring the terms
and intent of it but nonetheless

presenting an extraordinarily various
set of faces to the avenue, in the warm light
of the shop. Then I or you, whoever’s

doing the looking, understands
that this is the city’s particular signature,

the range of possibilities within any single set,
and what is pleasing is not the individual clock

(goofy or kitsch, in their frostings and columns,
scrollworks and gildings) but the distance
between it and its name,

the degree to which it belongs and at the same time
pushes towards the edges of difference

– a perception that makes the window a spectacle,
thirty-seven branching aspects of a single notion,

almost absurdly divergent
in their essentially useless variety.

And when you turn away again, there on the sidewalk
is a perfect instance of the category sink,

in this case kitchen, a double stainless model
– discarded from an apartment or restaurant –
battered around the drain, humbled at its edges,

rim a little crumpled, but the interior
shining from the lifetime of scouring that’s made

this singular instance of the uncountable
manifestations of its category
in all the five boroughs, and beauty

resides not within individual objects but
in the nearly unimaginable richness of their relation.