Ode to a Once-Beautiful Adam
You were only a statue, after all.
When your plywood pedestal collapsed
You fell apart. The Metropolitan Museum
Now apologizes to Tulio Lombardo,
The sculptor who is, of course,
Conveniently dead. When I, a mere
Volunteer there, walked through
The sculpture court,
I enjoyed your naked, perfect body,
An unattainable ideal,
Even your perfectly formed cock and balls.
Are these latter why you fell off your pedestal
Or, more correctly, it failed you?
When I was still “wigged out” from brain surgery
I loved to contemplate your perfect body
I could never touch,
But need neither mourn nor feel rejected by.
Artistic perfection misleads us
If we look at it in living men
So I both miss you and don’t.
The museum is going to try
To put you back together again.
It may take four months.
My recovery took four years.
I emerged from it fat and middle-aged.
But I wouldn’t trade breathing living
For being a perfect statue.
Look at what happened to your
Immortality, after all—
Demolished (only temporarily
I hope) by the failure of
An anonymous piece of wood.
From now on I’ll look at
Sculptures of real men and women,
Like Rodin’s fat, naked, middle-aged Balzac.
I hope real people can be satisfied
With real, imperfect lovers
And not be permanently deceived
By Gods, angels, or ideals
In stone like you.
(first appeared in Brainlifts, Straw Gate Books, 2008)
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Being There & The Idiot: Rothko
It's clear he's painting spaces between objects
And odd shapes made by the eye of that space.
The Tentacles of Memory look like synapses.
The dissolution of vision as a spiritual experience
As if going blind were to see.
The paintings make the babbling old
Museum ladies silent, a great accomplishment.
Filling the void with color.
Letting the silence grab you without knowing why.
Which are the colors of emotion?
Which are the colors of peace?
When one stands where the borders overlap,
Where are one's feet? In one's eyes?
Ticket stubs with no printed messages
Float in their brothers' color sea.
It's no longer embarrassing to be
Thrown back on oneself
Because the crowd is quiet
Except for a babbling baby.
Since nobody owns the mind,
Its fragments echo,
An investment of intensity
Not so much seen as felt.
Even in darkness
There is variation of the hands.
Written at a Rothko retrospective.
(first appeared in Brainlifts, Straw Gate Books, 2008)