Pyre

"The Banquet," 1958, Rene Magritte

Pyre

Walk backwards through any museum
and you can see astonishing flickers
and flickerings out of humanity and technology
Here is a mobile and an exploded gunky galaxy
In the next room bars fiery with shouting
and movement Lamps and flower-clogged ponds
Pretty soon it devolves into haystacks and cows
Grotesque infants and shrouded ladies
and steel and iron in a sword with a handle
burnished from its former funeral pyre
I imagine someone whose lucky job it is
at this museum unpacking a box of blades
Lifting this one Holding all of its cool
five pounds with the air conditioner breathing
down on the back of her neck With the sun
Always the same sun presiding outside

[Image above by Rene Magritte]