Having Bummed a Smoke Outside of the National Gallery, Though I Have Quit
“And if it rains, a closed car at four. And we shall play a game of chess.”
–Eliot
The trees stick out
their tongues
at all of us squatting
at their trunks while wild onions
fall limp at their tips
like month-old mohawks.
Candy-coated tourist
buses park toe to heel.
Yesterday, sushi
and a slipped-off
boot and socked foot
in the lap for lunch
and noodles and beef alone
in Chinatown last night.
Will another woman ever
place her handbag on the grass,
commando-crawl to it, finger
the stalk-eye of her camera,
and snap twenty shots
of the Capitol dome
perched upon her slouched
purse like a Pope’s mitre?
Would Cézanne study this team
of Segways rolling past
with their unmanned eyes
and over-ripened helmets?
Would Rousseau replace
the mannered Samoyed
with a jeweled collar and thin
leash and hook up
this albino squirrel
begging for a cheese danish
instead, stroking it wild
as the boy in a harness
pulling with all his strength
against his mother’s thick strap,
the Washington Monument
distending from his hunched back;
Modigliani wouldn’t have
to stretch the mother’s face
beyond the long length
it has become.
The stoled woman
reckoning a Claesz
in the Gallery
asked no one out loud,
“who would eat
a peacock pie,
all its feathers
in a vase beside it?”
“And all of those blue eyes
flirting with you,”
I responded,
“and I would.”
* * *
Morning at The Met
–after Nauman’s Eat/Death, Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), Warhol’s Twenty-Five Colored Marilyns, and Noland’s Bluewald
On the fluorescent sign
I try to read as DINER,
EAT ripens orange
as coiled eyes
on a stove
inside the D and H
buttressing DEATH.
And piled beside it,
hard candy
like Cabochon-
cut jewels
begs us to take
and eat this gift
and thus diminish
its ideal weight
of 175 pounds.
And we do—
first, the woman with rainbows
on her fleece socks
for three butterscotches.
Then a bald man fingers
a cinnamon round
and whispers a prayer
I am close enough to eat,
and I bow my head
and close my eyes with him.
We all eat and eat and eat
(the spicy, the sweet)
like what took the artist’s love
from him and wait
for the replenished pile
his statement promises.
Twenty Marilyns nod and lip
from the next room, lemon hair
tunneling across her foreheads,
mint eye shadow
and collars still lingering
in the roofs of our mouths.
Oswald, paper-punched seven times,
his body reddening, would curse us as fools
of art if the Flag were not
stuffed into his mouth like a gag.
* * *
After Thanksgiving Dinner by Louis Lozowick
A stack
of bread
teeters
in a loose
shuffle like
a loaded deck
of cards. Iris
beards swell
from the pot
of soup. The man
with an ash-
tray chin and
pool-pocket
eyes suspends
his fist over
dinner like a sledge.
The other men
in line
aren’t thankful
for him.
* * *
After Matisse’s Studio, Quai Saint-Michel
Canvas within
a canvas.
He stepped
back
from his chair
and easel
thus reducing
her,
leaving the hip
and thigh
charcoaled
close enough
to twirl
her hair
at the kiss
of her elbow.
The ink pot
clutches the table.
Beside me,
on the museum bench,
a baby screams,
the mother
shooing and cooing
the infant
then plopping
out a breast.
Even the mother
shudders at first.
* * *
Overheard Next to deKooning’s Evacuation
“You see the figures,
torsos, torsos?”
“Yeah, yeah, I guess so.”
“Teeth, teeth, typical
deKooning teeth.”
“You can’t give them back.”
“A horrible head.”
“Ah, that ruins it.”
“The rice fields ruin it.”
“Early Black Period—
one show, his breakthrough.”
“See the crack?”
“Must be a board.”
“And his late work goes back to that.”
“Oh, look, a penis,
and that eye, a vagina.”
“Rice fields, workers, right.”