by Miroslav Holub
br> (Issue 4; posted March 21, 1997; archived April 4, 1997)

To the tune of "Bolero,"
any ark
will be ruined
once, the trilingual
Rosetta Stone will be broken, steles of Halicarnassus
will turn to dust, sandstone Assyrian spirits
with eagle heads will shyly take off,
the carved man-head lions of Ashursirpolis will croak,
the last red-granite hand of the Colossus of Thebes
will drop off, the Indian supergod Harikaru
will cover his onyx eyes, the Rhind mathematical
scrolls
will catch fire, the suspended Zen poems will
evaporate,
and the green hellish judge from the Ming dynasty
will whine.

For the time of stone is meted out
and so is the time of myth.

Only genes are etemal,
from body to body,
from one breed to another breed,
on Southampton Row
in fact
you find walking genetic codes of Egyptian mummies,
deoxyribonucleic acid of the man from Gebelin,
hereditary traits of the man from Lindow,
whose bodily receptacle, cut in half by a bulldozer,
successfully swells under a glass bell,
in Bloomsbury, in fact, you find
all the eternity of the world rushing around
buying black flowers for the Last Judgment, less Last
than a midnight hotdog.

So the British Museum is not to be found
in the British Museum.

The British Museum is in us,
quite in the middle,
quite at the bottom.

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Miroslav Holub is a Czech immunologist and poet who has published 20 collections of poetry and essays. His work has been widely translated, although for years his books were banned in his homeland. This poem is from Intensive Care, published by Oberlin College Press in 1996; it can be purchased on-line from Amazon.com ($15.95). Another volume of his poetry, Interferon, or On Theater, can be purchased directly from the Oberlin College Press ($4.95; phone 1 (216) 775-8408).