An afternoon in the city
We walked through the cold, granite park that day,
ice-skaters breezed by in merry furies, loops upon loops,
maddened by the wind,
with bright shining faces and bright shining eyes,
and everywhere I looked
couples burrowed in each others’ arms.
I suggested the museum,
the first floor was empty
except for two high school kids who played hooky
and jested beside the glass of Renaissance art;
I stared at them meekly, as if I envied their sweet
adolescent rebellion. They were drenched in
whatever I wanted.
You lingered in the early art periods;
I approached a Grecian bust, once perfect,
now broken,
scuffed forehead, damaged nose and some dust.
A security guard paced the length of a wall,
I asked what exhibit was showing,
“de Kooning just left,” said the
On the second floor, Munch’s bedroom girl,
we both agreed, “a mystery of emotion,
haunting, beautiful, a dream . . .”
That brief instant was gone forever, like the day,
and the next, dominated by a hunchbacked curator
who lectured to the floor about floating blocks and cubes,
“both subject and
object moving,” (a preacher
went to see his lover, a dancer in a midnight club)
amorous obsessions, I thought.
Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait: the room full of spectators.
I stood there in a trance
beneath the fixed stare of triumph or terror,
beneath the weary beard of jagged lines,
inchoate strokes . . .
Later in bed, you grieved.
I said what I loved
about the portrait
the sheer incompleteness—as if
the colors were still dripping, and the artist
somewhere near.
CRA
1/20/2008