The New Criterion
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Poems

May 1996

Viollet-le-Duc

by David Gelernter

Blue he said is the light the light is blue.
The glowing points of blue in Christian glass.
If you were forced to live indoors—what if you
liquified the sky stone trees and grass

into a test tube, opened it inside:
might you feel sorry for yourself in there?
Or idly steel your mind bed down and ride
the fragrance? Smoke unraveling in air,

that marks a splintered forest smashed, bound tight
put down on hearth and burnt up: watch the steep
flames’ leap of resurrected light!
The pale drunk-making softness, bristling-deep.

The reconstructed sky is cramped but true.
A reconstructed body’s like that too.


David Gelernter is

David Gelertner teaches computer science at Yale
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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 14 May 1996, on page 41
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