Of an Aesthete

Of an Aesthete

For love of the Cleveland Museum of Art

What the museum is not—

crowding, touching, breathing sometimes,

just free easy looking,

distancing and whispering.

But my back won’t concur 

and there is nowhere to sit now,

no place to contemplate

the overwhelming proof

of God on every wall, every

gallery a devotional to creation.

The Christ Child sleeps alone in heavenly peace

on a bed of marble, obeying the rules,

his illustrated life surrounds him,

from angelic innocence to piercing agony.

What would we know otherwise

if not this promise of preservation

in this stone pantheon, light swelling

through the open-sky atrium, so near, so eternal.