This poem combines references to the W. B. Yeats poem called “The Statues” and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem “Uriel.”
“Caryatid” and “atlas” here are terms for statues sculpted into the columns of buildings, female and male respectively. You are invited to take them as allegorical figures.
A tableau vivant is a group of people arranged in a scene as an art piece — people pretending to be statues.
— AR
I Caryatid affixed in unconquered guile Whose lips the live faces of men disturb in their sleep, Whose ideal heat the atlas at the other end entreats To hold up the world — you both of calculated face A measured man sculpted into place, Said “Look! This!”, Something about Pythagoras, And published a poem about it in a book. Each reads the other’s look, Live ones you are, and later on Again in the street I see you, tableau vivant, Bemused and naked -- naked but you do not touch, Each an arena alone amidst centripetal thrust That vibrates and asks like an unread book. Alone in its field across magnetic bounds Each adamant hurries in aphoristic frenzy to break, Or else wastes itself on living too long, And then an evil arrives to take its place. This is each one’s most wicked face, But only wicked if you know where they started. They said, a little wounded, they were waiting to strike When Zeus hit them hard with a bolt. But I for one Would have thanked him for such merciful rupture, That baffles all measure in deserted seizure, And shocks you out of your blood. Instead the statues stand here at the end And cannot bear their lust. They gaze across the mathematic gulf And pretend to will, to love, stand still. II At night I see Mount Olympus go out — Aphrodite’s displays, Dionysus in doubt — And the clothes they wear out in the world, Take off at home ... Each encircles the other In a unit’s universal embrace ... For each The other lovingly curtails its face ... Shadow of a world not ours, They are still out-of-doors. We called it obscure heaven Or the open road, but it’s hard to tell. Nemesis then struck up its star And shook the clouds, said looking down: “All is evil; all will go well.”
Brilliant. And, ironically considering these are ancient characters, timely.