Tourists Under Glass

             Topkapi

They grin at solemn heads with laurel wreaths
calcified to mottled rock, lopsided, bent—
and wish to fold themselves like thin gold leaf
around each skull left pregnant with intent:

those underwater stares in sepulchres,
with veins of darkness cutting through the bones,
the brains; those perfect teeth in gaping jaws,
adrift in aisles of semiprecious stones.