Poems

Poems from Corruption

From “Three Slaves by Michelangelo Buonarotti

III Atlas

The slave we call Atlas is attached to an unshaped immensity.

Atlas lived in Atlantis once.
Now he lives in the Gallery of Slaves at the Academy in Florence.

There’s a block of stone where his head should be.

Unlike David, who has a head wrapped in acanthine curls,
a slingshot, buttocks, and inescapable genitals,

Atlas has only the burden of the material against which he struggles—
raw marble, a torso, one shoulder, one heroic arm.

His arm pushes mightily against a dead weight
and disappears inside it, as if weight itself had a secret chamber

where one could think things through, away from the crowd.
His head’s in there too, thinking

of mind over matter or matter inside mind or the other way round.
Big Mind is like a sky vault or like a mountain,

hard to support with the head alone.
And yet one needs a head to figure out

how mind attaches to the stuff we’re made of.

Atlas attaches through tendon and nerve.
Atlas has a spinous process.

Atlas is the first vertebra of the cervical spine.
Atlas is a winged bone with a hole in it.

Atlas is delicate.
Atlas curves and breathes

up through the hole to the great sky dome
where the Pleiades light up the dark and private life

of the mind, where we are all of us alone.