The unfinished temple of Zeus at Agrigento with
Ann Keniston
its broken columns was, if I’m remembering right,
too wide and long to support the roof, which kept collapsing,
also due to earthquakes, till someone realized the temples
in Asia Minor couldn’t be surpassed in size or scale or
by then that ambition was obsolete. When I first saw
the enormous intact altar, I thought it was the temple’s
footprint, then realized the ruins were off to one side,
a pile of every-which-way segments I scrambled through
and touched, partly reconstructed temples on either side,
each inaccurately combining elements from different periods
but nice for tourist photos, especially when floodlit
at night. The randomly heaped-up columns at Selinunte
also moved me, each section so thick three people
couldn’t touch hands around it, enormous, stubby,
and incomplete, awe inspiring though I knew my awe
was based on clichés about the doomed ambitions
of the ancients, their actual history and purpose
unknown to me because I had no guidebook but
probably built by the ancestors of the current locals
or their slaves, the nearby Roman arenas—I read this
on a sign—repurposed from Greek theaters
with channels added to sluice away the blood
of victims, also mostly slaves, at least one temple
later turned, unchanged, into a Christian church.
Ann Keniston is a poet, essayist, and critic interested in the relation of the creative to the scholarly. She is the author of several poetry collections, including, most recently, Somatic (Terrapin 2020), as well as several scholarly studies of contemporary American poetry. Recent poems and essays have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Fourth Genre, and Five Points. A professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she teaches poetry workshops and literature classes, she lives in Reno.