courthouse steps

to say no more of art than that it makes, by its very distraction a mode of abiding accordingly, its variations:    each type of thread-and-piecework named double engagement ring, log cabin, or broken dishes all built on the same geometric figures— precise interception of angle and line so too each tale of love is rooted in that first tale:    the poet descending to the underworld finally granted his shade, who'll follow him only to disappear again.      perhaps one version has them reunite affixed in their solo chromospheres the stars, which, to the human eye, appear to overlap substanceless love immune at last to gravity and time— in texas (I might as well recount this as a story) there's a town with a courthouse built on concrete and twisted iron edified in red granite, capitals & architrave of red sandstone with point and punch, a carver broached the effigy of his muse he rendered her attractive features, down to the very blush of course she spurned him, of course there was another to whom she turned love should not be written in stone but written in water (I paraphrase the latin of catullus) the sculptor carried on:    not just the face of his beloved but the face of her other lover: snaggle-toothed, wart-peppered, pudgy them both, made into ugly caricatures of themselves, as wanton as the carver perceived them, and as lewd well, craze and degenerate and crack:   the portraits hold though, long since, the participants have dwindled into dirt beautiful.      unbeautiful.      each with an aspect of exactness tread light upon this pedestal.      dream instead of a time before your love disfigured, a time withstanding even crass, wind-beaten time itself