The Cloisters

From a place in the kingdom of France
They brought the stained glass and the stones
to build on the island of Manhattan
these hollow Cloisters.
They are not apocryphal.
They are faithful monuments to a nostalgia.
An American voice tells us
to pay for what we want,
because this whole building is an invention
and the money as it leaves our hand
will become shekels or vanish like smoke.
This abbey strikes more terror
than the pyramid of Giza
or the labyrinth at Knossos,
because it too is a dream.
We hear the fountain’s murmur,
but that fountain’s in the Patio of the Orange Trees
or the epic of Der Asra.
We hear clear Latin voices
but those voices echoed in Aquitaine
when it was a stone’s throw from Islam.
We see in the tapestries
the resurrection and the death
of the white condemned unicorn,
because time in this place
does not obey an order.
The laurel trees I touch will flower
when Leif Ericsson sights the sands of America.
I feel a touch of vertigo.
I am not used to eternity.