{"id":8590,"date":"2024-04-13T20:47:25","date_gmt":"2024-04-13T20:47:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/?p=8590"},"modified":"2024-04-13T20:47:25","modified_gmt":"2024-04-13T20:47:25","slug":"when-the-art-no-longer-remains-3-poems-by-ralph-monday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/when-the-art-no-longer-remains-3-poems-by-ralph-monday\/","title":{"rendered":"When the Art No Longer Remains. 3 Poems by Ralph Monday"},"content":{"rendered":"
\r\nRome\u2019s Mythic Hills<\/strong>\r\n\r\nAmong  Rome's mythic hills \r\nthis is what I told you:\r\nThe Moon is an old and silver rimmed lover,\r\nblood burned pewter at night prowling\r\nthe Colosseum's sands.\r\nWhy are Americans so savage?\r\nLook to the wolf nature engendered by Rome,\r\nbird Auguries spun into DNA across a\r\ntime never ended. The world did not\r\nbecome dark. The wolf retired to her lair\r\nand slept while the West went into\r\nsupernatural amnesia.\r\nReason and fancy are strange bedfellows.\r\nShall you undergo Inquisition? Perhaps\r\nit's been following all of us.\r\nCome now, take my hand. Let us \r\nstroll through these familiar ruins, Faustina.\r\nSoon the mother of the world will be dead.\r\n\r\nBring Us Soft Graces<\/strong>\r\n\r\nIf we only could achieve a kind\r\nof grace,\r\nto love and feast as the ancients\r\ndid, like gods turning in bed on\r\nMt. Olympus.\r\n\r\nI think we both have long been\r\n(futilely) looking for Plato\u2019s sphere\r\nbut we can\u2019t even find half an orange\r\nto piece back together, let alone imagine a\r\nfuture spoken out in syncopated syllables.\r\nIf we could we would incarnate both spirit\r\nand flesh in moments undarkened by\r\nthe past pains that others have brought.\r\n\r\nBut one can never escape those textured\r\ntimes, for what we were always walks\r\nwith us, like shadows cast on a yellowed\r\nphotograph.\r\n\r\nThe body we once had is not the\r\nflesh we now carry, for the cells\r\nreplace every seven years. The\r\nmind that we once had has been\r\ntempered with interactions of others\r\nwhere we listened to their foolish\r\nthoughts.\r\n\r\nAbstracted form does hold meaning,\r\nand that is what we have become: a\r\ntype of fragmented cubism rendered up\r\nin 1920s Paris.\r\n\r\nIf only we could embrace soft\r\ngraces. If only we could make the\r\npieces fit a new puzzle. \r\n\r\nAh, wouldn\u2019t it be pretty to think\r\nso.\r\n\r\nWhen the Art No Longer Remains<\/strong>\r\n\r\nSeventeen turned to thirty-five\r\ndeep in the troughs of his own tides\r\nhe will presently forget the nights and days \r\nwith her, the shared moons from month to\r\nmonth.\r\n\r\nThe tales that they created, moments of\r\nice and fire, of victories on the playing\r\nfields, defeats that were ignored.\r\n\r\nStories can only carry so far, before they\r\nsettle into mystery and myth, into buried\r\nlayer after layer, where they change,\r\nthrough the years and move us back to\r\n\r\ntruck headlights knifing the dark on the\r\ninterstate, to going down to the still\r\nwaters and drinking, to wash off the\r\ndeep sins that can never be winter white.\r\n\r\nThey weren\u2019t really battles, no\r\ndark ages crusades, merely seasonal\r\nskirmishes that neither knew the meaning\r\nof.\r\n\r\nI have seen many autumns with Bradford leaves\r\nblazed and burnt reds, oranges, and yellows,\r\nthe ripened pear and apple, leaves burnt\r\nwith frost, foliage like some randomly\r\nthrown design, an Arabian carpet thick\r\nwith memory, desire.\r\n\r\nIs there a Mind producing a Design?\r\nThis is a mystery that cannot be\r\nplumbed, only hinted at by art, and\r\nwe never had a design, only a random\r\nblueprint made up as we went along. <\/pre>\n
 
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\nRalph Monday<\/strong> is Professor of English at RSCC in Harriman, TN. Hundreds of poems published. Books: Al l American Girl and Other Poems, 2014. Empty Houses and American Renditions, 2015. Narcissus the Sorcerer, 2015. Bergman\u2019s Island & Other Poems, 2021, The Book of Appalachia 2023<\/em>, and a humanities text, 2018. Member Lincoln Memorial University Literary Hall of Fame. Twitter @RalphMonday <\/a>Poets&Writers https:\/\/www.pw.org\/directory\/writers\/ralph_monday<\/a><\/p>\n
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Rome\u2019s Mythic Hills Among Rome’s mythic hills this is what I told you: The Moon is an old and silver rimmed lover, blood burned pewter at night prowling the Colosseum’s sands. Why are Americans so savage? Look to the wolf nature engendered by Rome, bird Auguries spun into DNA across a time never ended. The … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[808,796,366,401,43,1018],"tags":[18,1019],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8590"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8590"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8590\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8593,"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8590\/revisions\/8593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}