MIGNON
I’ll never have a better steak though the meat
could be more tender and my crooked
alley view of the Acropolis less obscured.
That it cost three bucks and came with good
fries by the scad and a chipped bottle
of local wine further predisposes
me to forgive the Greeks for letting
their civilization fall to pieces.
The caraway seeds of destruction
were present, I’ve read,
in the pillared shrine.
Between real and seeming
symmetry, they skewed
the lines for their eyes,
not hers for whom they
once had named themselves,
optical refinements,
the experts say: 70,000
noninterchangeable parts
and hardly a right angle
in the place. My favorite
distortion would have
been the worst—entasis,
the bulging in the column
meant to show it’s bearing
weight. Consult tremorless
butchers protected from time.
It’s where choice cuts come
from when stone is on the line.
—Poets Respond
August 23, 2015
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Dore Kiesselbach: “An absurdist take on Greece’s economic plight, tracing it back to the hypothetically deliberate aestheticization of Athenian religious observance.” (website)
