The debris of time spent

Institute Of The Beautiful Arts

She walks up to the gate, wrought as she is to undertake
this expression of her bending nature, and pushes through.
A sunfast morning straddles her shoulders and she feels it as
she senses the inconstellations slipping by above her in the
glare, knows each intimately by the stories she’s given them.

Passing lawns erupting with sculpture and statuary, she
measures her valence against what other hands have left
in their wakes, the debris of time spent coursing blue
pastures for greener seas. With every step, a decision, a
choice, a rule followed or broken, an unmarked pathway
that will not yield willingly to her slightest touch. So she
boulders through the marble, through stentorian halls fitted
with more glass than dunes have calved in a millennium of
windshear, through echo after echo of cleared throats and
hesitant leather, the decided pause of unsurety in the human sole.

Before her an open door, one of many she is destined to regard.
It leads out and into what she may become and, without a stride’s
break, she continues past opting instead for what she will be.
The rooms are empty, no formal thing insists, and she knows
she has arrived intact at the Institute of the Beautiful Arts.
Steadying herself, she sets the charges and makes for the next.

Joseph Gallo
February 8, 2007