Portrait of a One-legged Hero

A short walk away, some Shiva in her tangle

might impress by being everywhere

with nowhere to put her hands. In the Temple

of Dendur, for example, amputated dynasties

float above the water of their last undoing,

and this is nothing new. The wind moves freely

in Nubia, just as my movement inexorably away

from the hero, even here, with many-legged

letters, testifies to the power of subtraction.

For Rilke, only the radiant torso. Saint-Gaudens

in the Boston Common so believable we argue

over one leg raised—I can almost feel breath,

smell horseness—and if it means the rider was a type

of hero. Though this, too, is a lie. The uses

we put legs to. In a Bordeaux or runway model,

long and slender. As for Greco-Roman wrestling

how some heroes lean on their emerald-studded canes.

I can almost hear the medals on their chests chatter

like teeth, witness to the last hobble before they numbed

for the painter. Last summer, such portraits loomed

above a breakfast table in a villa in the middle

of Chianti. Spritely boys in monkey suits offered

toast and coffee. As if I enjoyed it. We should all

be humiliated once a year. At least. And the cane?

Is it tradition or my spoiled life offering me the easy

appendage of otherness? What has this hero done

to deserve me, and I him? What does it mean to move

through the atriums of the Met, down each thigh veined

by taking away, gently, the marble around it?

Some Darwin in the islands the mind leads to:

Shackleton’s journal, jaundice of boat slowly, inexorably

sinking. Pelvic bones of hundreds of monks seen perpetually

in exodus on the ceiling of the Capuchin crypt in Rome.

Go there. If creation is ex nihilo, sculptors, runway models,

even Achilles, are photonegatives, defined by disappearances.

What remains are remains.