La Porte de l'Enfer (Gates of Hell), by Auguste Rodin, by Royal Rhodes

Gates of Hell at Rodin Sculpture Garden Stanford University, by Auguste Rodin (France) c. 1880-1890. photography by Allan J. Cronin 2009 (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia Commons.

La Porte de l'Enfer (Gates of Hell), by Auguste Rodin 

Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise,
discoloured by attempts at restoration,
represented the narrow way.
You gave us the gates to the other place
that most -- at least many -- will use,
for the broad avenue to hell.
The sculpture left from antiquity,
ostentatious rubble strewn
in ruined cities, you rubbed with your palms,
like the model's body, a dancer's, who said
you kneaded her flesh like pliant dough,
your mind lost in a blind man's quest
to map the skeletal armature,
the give and resistance, signs of past
growth and elongation inside.
Salon critics accused you of fraud.
Such figures could only be cast from life,
so naturalistic they almost spoke.
Even the male physique of the Thinker
embodied the practical thought of a maker
with the bronze hands of a handyman
and free of evanescent ideas.
Fertile human forms, jerry-built,
showed life's goal, raised like an altar.
As you worked, pressing faces in clay,
wax discs of Gregorian chant
played on your wind-up gramophone.
You donned a monk's habit in death
as contrition, and mixed the profane and sacred.
Your bronze titans, ecstatic lovers,
and doomed prophets, striding naked,
showed us the hot metal, when cooled,
was twice as vulnerable as flesh.

Royal Rhodes

Royal Rhodes taught classes in global religions and death & dying for almost forty years at Kenyon College. His poems have appeared in various literary journals, online and in print including: Star 82 Review,  Halfway Down the Stairs, Autumn Sky Poetry, and Foreshadow (UK).