Sam Rush
The Spandrels of San Marco
Two rounded archways, built adjacent, will form above them an empty, v-shaped space. That space is called a spandrel. Evolutionary biologists borrow the term to describe a trait that has no functional value, but is the byproduct of selection for a useful adaptation. Your tailless tailbone: spandrel. Nipples that don’t lactate: spandrel.
Anthropologists suggest that our human tendency towards belief in the supernatural results from selection for a trait called agent detection-- our ability to assign motive to that which exists outside ourselves, to create meaning, to imagine a story that fills the empty space around a Why—that belief in God is nothing more than an evolutionary accident, left over space around a useful adaptation, a spandrel.
Spandrel: Once a man held me in his arms
like a question mark
for the first time I wished two objects
could exist with no space between them
Ύ
Spandrel: My father taught me grief is like a hole
inside of you
Mourning doesn’t fill the hole
it is simply how we learn to live around it.
Ύ
Spandrel: When I was fifteen God or something like it
plucked a hole in me
my hearing began to drip out slowly
leaving behind an empty space
The space filled with a piercing ring
that aches & wakes me in the night
Ύ
Spandrel: I learned to love from story boys with waking
boomboxes held above their heads & pillars of salt
The story goes love is love when it turns its object’s
name into a seraphim, their voice into a prayer
Ύ
Spandrel: Sometimes I hear voices in the ringing
Sometimes I hear the voice of the man
who held me a question mark
Sometimes I hear the voice of God
Sometimes I cannot tell the difference
Ύ
Spandrel: The thing about love & death is that both turn
humans into Gods without asking
Ύ
Spandrel: Sometimes I hear voices in the ringing
Sometimes the creak of the rope he lost to
in a quarry outside Cincinnati
I do not know the shape of it
I imagine a gaping empty space
Ύ
Spandrel: I do not wish to make
this man a God
I do not wish to erase the callous in his voice
or the careless moments of greed
I do not wish to write him into my own mythology
to absolve an empty space
Ύ
The incidental space of the spandrels
at San Marco’s Bascillica in Venice, Italy
are filled and blooming
with delicate portraits of angels
Onlookers crane their necks
to gaze upon them & upward
towards heaven
& forget the ground
Ύ
Spandrel: Once I fell in love the way the story goes
& forgot my own name
The story goes you will be loved
into a whole
The story goes you are born
with a hole inside you
the shape of your lover’s arm
or ear or crooked neck
The story goes you will look upon your lover
& see heaven in their eyes
Ύ
Spandrel: I do not wish to forget
your eyes for heaven
Ύ
Spandrel: I do not wish for a love that cranes my neck
upwards & away from this earth
Ύ
Spandrel: I try to hold myself at night like a question mark
but cannot coax my body into arching
because it is harder for me to imagine a story
that ends in a trans body coming
than it is for me to imagine a story
that ends in a trans body coming back from the dead
Ύ
Spandrel: am afraid to be loved
like a symbol
Ύ
Spandrel: I am afraid to be loved
like a myth
Ύ
Spandrel: I am afraid of a love that will turn me to false God
only to prove me fallacy
Ύ
Spandrel: I am bending backwards praying
away the empty space of me
Ύ
Spandrel: There are voices in the ringing
In the silence there is a song
& I know he is not waiting for me
out there in the gaping air
but I swear
I swear to God
I hear something
Note: This poem is after the essay "The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme" by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin.
Photo by Matthew Radwan
[Image Description: A light skinned person with short brown hair looks at the camera with a sculpture of a hand with fingers crossed in the foreground covering their left ear.]
Sam Rush
Sam Rush began writing poetry after developing progressive hearing loss and realizing how many words each word could be. Sam's poems have appeared in Muzzle, The Journal, The Offing and elsewhere. They were a finalist at the 2016 National Poetry Slam and are author of the collection, swallow (Sibling Rivalry Press), forthcoming in fall of 2020.