Lost Wax
Wherever there was wax, there will be bronze.
---Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571)
It can make you laugh: a giant foot on a flat-bed truck,
or a nose--as big as a refrigerator--sniffing under the red
light--holding it red longer than usual. And one hot night
in August, a fifteen foot head of Elvis was spotted making
its sultry way above the corn fields. Sculpture is no small
thing, and the lost-wax method has been found again
in this Colorado town where bronze was something
you did to baby shoes. And where are they going—
these castings of ourselves--these larger-than-lifes?
I imagine a smog-filled city calls up an order for a tall
bronze woman to pour unending buckets of cold water
into a pool where hot men sit smoking, sleeves rolled
up, where each day is like doing time. And I’ve seen
a field in Syracuse where thirty sculpted mothers writhe
with thirty separate griefs (a keening hieroglyphic:
arms and legs beseeching, bended, broke)
over the loss of their children from Pan Am Flight 103.
And where does the lost wax go? Some say that like a soul
it slips away. It cannot hold to form for long and when
the heat becomes too much, it leaves a space for memory
to pour itself a monument around. It is here we bring our
flowers. But at the core, the hollow breath of wax remains
more fixed than bronze and tells of how it almost carried
to the sun a young and dreaming Icarus.
