Dennis Goza
The Mission
(San Juan Capistrano)
“Museum rooms are furnished in historic metaphor.”
But history's always a metaphor, warping
the past into furniture for the present
and accidental knots resist unraveling most.
Which was their wine vat, which their latrine?
They left half a footprint, and no blueprint
for impossible births, the faithful crushed
in an orgy of stone and gravity before
they could grasp what widened their final blink.
The cannon blooms rust out in a courtyard
toned by Eliot's ghost. But the altar
never alters, being always freshly favored
with gilt. Cameras cocked like vultures, we,
whose tools have become toys, ponder
what candid tidings might be scrawled
on backs of statues; we rearrange the dust
as if hoping to Ouija their mission
of shepherding dun into sublimity.
