As Relic, As Remnant

Beneath old cities,
the spades divulged
finely trussed corpses:
an ancient requital
for displacing the land.
Now, history stiffens
on display
like a well-lived body:
steel carvings cracking
like bones in the moor;
papers worn fibrous
as skin; paintings flaking
with luster,
as every fine coat must.
Even the Elgin marbles
have stilled,
their mouths steeled blue
like the wet-wool nubs
knotting the clouds together.
Here, city-skirts undress
into sprawls of pale light,
chip-toothed lawns
fraying gray
like old boutique lace.
Loosed
from their ashy mouths
are graffiti walls,
rugged houses
wearing rooftops
like shingled hips—
all the vernacular homes,
the ones now wintering
into craters. Look.
The evicted rise
from placards of cardboard,
gnarled hands and creased faces
holding hardened daylight,
the city installing
fault lines at their feet
as though their removal
were a sort of renewal:
an immortalization
of the well-lived.
Yet, two storefronts down,
the statues backlit
in the museum’s glass mouths
look like any other man
in the light.