We don't really want to know our muses.
Intimacy gnaws reality
and we bury the bones
in our shallow, unmarked collective unconscious.
Let the Mona Lisa keep her secrets.
What pressing need of prurience is satisfied
by knowing her teeth were bad
and her breath stank like rotten flesh?
Fleeting creatures of surface sensations,
we prefer not to know
the substance of our dreams.
Do not tell us
that the Venus di Milo,
the alabaster projection of desire
would have used her arms
to hold us at a distance.
Our petty personal mythologies
could not survive
revelations of flabby upper arms
and a nervous, self-inflicted manicure.
We love illusion
and we turn from our muses
when they show us
they are flesh and bone,
fear and foible.
Aesthetically bankrupt,
art offers us no absolution.
In the absence of grace,
we are reduced to icons.
This poem was first published in Issue 19 of Gravity, An Online Journal of Writing, Music and Art. This poem was also published in Silhouettes in the Electric Sky: The Best Poetry from Two Years of Gravity. J. Carle., ed. Atlanta, Georgia: Newton’s Baby, 1998. ISBN 0966722809. Click here to purchase Silhouettes.
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