Common House Magazine

I don’t know what I like, but I know about art.

That knowledge, my sole charisma,

manifests at museums, so that I

seldom have to initiate;

someone else, tracing

the circuit between my eyes and

the work, tries to join. And even

when others hear and gather, my voice

remains a lucid reverent murmur:

I’m never asked to leave,

the guards think it’s a tour… The whole

floor is now Color Field abstractions

from the good old days. “You might think

they express the desire of

that predigital age to become one

with electronics and the power

of missiles. Not a bit of it.

Or perhaps Yes, that, but also

the opposite: a religious-or-Zen urge

for transcendence, inherited from AbEx but given

a hard edge and so distanced, even

inverted… Lend yourself to that red or to

those red, blue, yellow, and green

squares; don’t you find yourself

becoming simpler, calmer, forgetting

death? Or to those five-foot-long candy cane

stripes – you’re not a thing anymore,

but speed…”

                                 And if, instead, it’s a

once-in-a-lifetime show

from Venice, and I, we, looking at

vivid weeping or wondering crowds

attending Nativities and Crucifixions,

I say and you see that

they are all waiting for the Machine.