As the sleepers wept in darkness, statues invaded the gymnasium.
They whispered ancient codicils to distant stars who hearkened raptly.
A statue of a piano began to paint an image of wings in blood.
Two statues of turtles swam, spiraling upwards into the high place.

As those who wept silently began to dream, the statues met in secret.
The feet of a decapitated woman danced with the head of a scholar.
The sleepers would never understand. Statues moved and shattered.
They woke to impossible splendors, to unimaginable fervors.

It was night, and in the gymnasium, a marble child unfurled her colors
like stairs into ecstasy, her mountain rose from wooden floors
her oceans were white plaster, shot through with the eyes of does.
Her rivers were ruddy antlers, porcupine eyes, and the gentle word
that carries the souls of butterflies to further and further beauty in death.

Inside the sleepers, gymnasia blossomed like storms of blanched fever.
The stillness within the statues was as a way of thunder.
All around the sleepers, ragged dolls observed them with dead eyes.
And the dead themselves invaded time, through holes in doors,
through holes in keys. Through the missing limbs of sculpted bodies.

The statue of Justice unveiled her living eyes. Her scales were twin suns.
As her sword shattered, the entire assembly consumed its shards,
like the crisp wafers of war communion, the stolen alphabet of night.
It was moonlight writing history’s pulses in black water.
It was the white blossom of their theater, their nocturnal arabesques.

An angel wept and caught fire as her demon escaped,
emitting flows of the petals of exotic flowers from its several mouths.
And the statues danced like memories in whose torrid gaps
the sleepers wept and trembled, their fingers like sculpture,
their hidden eyes like embryonic gods.