the past
at the Acropolis Museum
As the tip of Neptune’s fishing fork
or sparks off Zeus’s lightning sent,
we surge toward the only marbles that
we know or care enough to battle for:
past reclining blue–beards, past the wide–
lipped smiles of kouroi shrugging off the dust
of years spent standing still beside a bust
of — Aphrodite, probably, they’ve tried
on every head to hand and yet to find
a match — and on up to the main event:
past Centaurs, Giants, Amazons all bent
to Athens’ feared civility, behind
the low plinth bearing plaster casts of what
with classic Attic dignity the sign
insists will rightfully return in time,
Athena sprung from Zeus full–formed, the cuts
of Phidias’s chisel close enough
to touch: and to the balcony, the wind,
the night as warm as the nearby sea, and lit
from everywhere, the Parthenon above.