The Book This Album Stole Its Name From (Francesco Colonna)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You were a Dominican friar
in fifteenth-century Venice
which is not the biography
anyone expects
from the author
of the strangest love story
ever printed —
a dream within a dream
within a garden
within an architecture
that does not obey
the laws
of any building inspector
who has ever lived
You wrote it in a language
that was not quite Latin
and not quite Italian
and not quite anything —
a hybrid
the Broca's region
would classify
as a tongue
that exists
only inside the book
that needed it

[Verse 2]
Poliphilo loves Polia —
that is the plot,
and the plot
is the least important thing
in the book
because between
the wanting
and the having
you installed
two hundred pages
of architectural description
so precise
the buildings could be built
and so imaginary
the buildings
could never be entered
You described gardens
that smelled like night-blooming jasmine
and the wet calcium
of fountains
carved from a stone
that does not exist
outside the sentence
that named it

[Chorus]
The title —
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili —
means the strife of love in a dream
which is five words
doing the work
of a thesis,
a confession,
and an architectural permit
The temporal lobe
that assembled the title
was building a word
the way your buildings were built:
ornate beyond function,
beautiful beyond reason,
a structure
designed not to be entered
but to be
walked around
and admired
from every angle
including the ones
that don't exist yet
We named this album after you
because three hundred songs
about the most interesting people
who ever lived
is exactly the kind of project
a Dominican friar
would have hidden
inside a dream

[Verse 3]
You hid your name
in an acrostic —
the first letter
of every chapter
spells:
Poliam Frater Franciscus Columna
peramavit —
Brother Francesco Colonna
loved Polia deeply —
which means
the entire book
is a confession
disguised as a table of contents
and the confession
was not discovered
for three hundred years
The hippocampus
filed the secret
in the structure
where nobody looks
because nobody reads
the first letter
of every chapter
in sequence
unless they love
the book enough
to disassemble it

[Outro]
The book was printed
by Aldus Manutius
in 1499 —
the most beautiful book
ever produced
by a press
that also invented
the semicolon
and the italic typeface
and the concept
that a book
could be small enough
to carry
You wrote
a dream about love
and hid your name
inside it
and the dream
outlived the dreamer
and the dreamer
outlived every building
he described
and here we are —
three hundred songs later —
still walking through
the garden you designed
still looking for Polia
still not finding her
which was always
the point