In a Museum of Deadly Sins
Begin: An apple.
Experts agree that it starts with an apple.∞
Arlene Kim
Must never peer away from the gluttony
of art: busts of greedy men, marbled
torsos, still lifes, women made to be
bogles of lust. Dioramas of what bodies
cannot contain, crypts of maggoted pride;
a certain ilk of fantasy. Yet the opulence
of empire & envy dawdles, sculpted to
hoard & ogle like pigeons warring before
frost. This storied country in a city
in a country seethes fluxes of riches,
priceless amulets & pillaged treasures
wainscoting plush galleries: an immaculate
estate. Is this a pious anthology? O Father,
we have sinned; to have & to hold, idle
& sloth at the expense of paupers. Our
charismatic tour guide named Massimo,
mayor of these bedazzled halls, shares a
fact that throws me into a tizzy: apple
& evil, in Italian, respectively, are spelled
mela & male. In Latin, malum, means both
evil & apple. Holy shit. I gesture at my head
somersaulting. This tidbit unearths what
may be our most original fraud, lost or
scythed in translation over centuries of
exodus, in the midst of combat, migration
& the sheer tenacity of dynasties. Doesn’t
proper transmission between fact & fiction
act as arbiter of evolving culture? Still, we
take the rumors of monks pinched by dim
candlelight that Eve emerged from the rib
of Adam, then became the source of iniquity
at face value. For what it’s worth, I refute
this baseless conclusion as I, too, gawk at
the ceiling of international repute among
throngs of other visitors, marveling at the
arduous labor of one prone Michelangelo
(also erroneous, he painted on his feet),
an undisputed masterpiece of propaganda
in the zeitgeist of robed pagan conceits. A
cerulean graphic novel to evoke the awe
of divinity, stuffing coffers & fear to the
masses. Straight up gospel: I arose from
the deepest cut of my mother’s abdomen,
a squealing entity, red & foreign, expelled
from her nuclear nursery, just as every
living being is borne from some kind of
bosom. In me, fury balloons, at the mess
of our mortal folly, as I wander the naves
prettied by barrel vaults & all that glitters,
chimeras of cardinals, parishes & rosaries
that haunt the edges. God does not reside
in these vicinities. In search of the sacred,
I ramble instead to an apse of redwoods &
evergreens, lie on the justice of moss, say
a prayer to the wind, sun, our throbbing
vibrations, among the floss of every web
& cambered glint at the altar of pinecones.
***
