John Foulcher http://johnfoulcher.com Sun, 07 Oct 2012 22:49:47 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Auguste Rodin at the Gates of Hell http://johnfoulcher.com/auguste-rodin-at-the-gates-of-hell/ http://johnfoulcher.com/auguste-rodin-at-the-gates-of-hell/#comments Mon, 15 Aug 2011 13:08:24 +0000 AdminJFK http://johnfoulcher.com/?p=216 Where are the souls, or their absence,
the cabaret of flesh, crouching and falling and writhing?
It was a lifetime, my Gates of Hell,
perhaps the only purpose
… Read more]]> It is not as I had imagined.
Where are the souls, or their absence,
the cabaret of flesh, crouching and falling and writhing?
It was a lifetime, my Gates of Hell,
perhaps the only purpose
I made for myself, though it never grew into its own,
and figures alone in its landscape
took to their separate perdition
with all the requisite sins –
The Thinker, for instance, The Kiss,
coming to life from the flames.
What kind of gates are these? asks the dull Bourdelle,
How do you open them? How do they close?
They close in the mind, Antoine,
the place of greater terror
than anything God could have dreamed.
I carried those gates on my back
as Christ would have hauled his cross,
and bits of their bronze bloodied my hands,
took chunks from my living heart
(though I paused now and then to make lovers,
kneading a creamy marble
more luscious than genuine skin).
But now it has come to this ordinary gate,
its neat and particular iron.
Where is the agony?  Where is the fire?
I have opened so many like this. I had hoped for better from Hell.

 

from the forthcoming The Sunset Assumption

 

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