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Art Survives


by Gary Hardaway


Trust that art survives: Emily's
seventeen hundred eighty-nine
idiosyncratic hymn-breathed
journal entries, Caravaggio's
lurid canvases, Chichen-Itza
strung with blood-fed vines.

Forget the salt erasure of Carthage,
all the Meso-American artifacts
smelted to float the Armada
and feed the Inquisition. Forget
the hydrocarbons gnawing what remains
of the Acropolis and the tidal tongues

that flick Piazza di San Marco.
Forget, too, recurrent dreams of methane
wafting up through bulldozed soil
from manuscripts typed but never sent.
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