william carlos williams. after visiting the capitol, the poet physician wrote a poem about it. first published in 1924, the poem was titled "it is a living coral." in his metaphor, the city is a sea, the capitol building an island in the sea and its art and architecture a coral that grows. the metaphor might be applied to any museum with an expanding collision. the capitol is not a museum. nor is it viewed as such by visitors. therein lies another side to the coral metaphor, the one that struck me most but one with which williams was not concerned. he could not have known during the 20th century they would develop a field of study devoted to coral mortality. to understanding why and how the world's coral reefs have suffered catastrophic destruction as a result of human land use, fishing and tourism. as the human impulse upon visiting a coral reef is to break off a piece of coral to take home, so have visitors to the capitol been tempted to take a piece of it for a souvenir. those souvenirs have in rare cases been physical objects. or they have been memories of physical interactions with the art objects such as the kiss that ports shared with freedom. that physical component of the capitol human experience is the first outline in the next half hour. more often, the takeaway has been in the realm of ideas, not objects. in the 21st century, thousands of visitors leave with a digital representation of themselves posing with a piece of the building or its art. selfies that fall into a space between objects and idea