Vault: A Poem

"Everyone who's ever read Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo" knows the depth, the loss, the bewilderment, the vision and discovery one has when encountering the work of art that's truly talismanic. This encounter lies at the heart of Kathleen Peirce's poetics. This poetics is aware that an encounter with a piece of art, (and, perhaps, language, too) is like entering a soul itself. She might be looking at a watercolor or at a statuette, or a gilded egg--but what she sees is the mystery of tim...