Poem: Gallery

[nebroadwe]

I rediscovered this poem in the depths of my files; I think I wrote it three or four years ago.

Gallery

At this museum, the wing of unpopular art
specializes in people -- mostly gentlemen in powdered wigs
and elegantly gowned ladies sporting plumed hats.

Between these examples of uninspiring, though no doubt lucrative, labor
(I try to guess which ones bought a meal or paid the rent),
a few subjects of greater interest lurk:
an angular child perched on a donkey-cart
trailed by a dog of indeterminate breed,
a smiling girl hefting a basket of figs,
a round-shouldered man squinting through a haze
of cigar smoke at a mottled skull,

and a wrinkled woman with enormous eyes,
her dark hair frosted with a mantilla,
a rosary wound around her fingers. Her gaze
does not follow the viewer; it is fixed
on the middle distance above our heads. No need
to acknowledge us, to conspire in our admiration
or contempt. She might treat suppliants as spies,
disdaining patronage in favor of the guerilla
charity of an anonymous donation.

I imagine she owned groves of fig trees, deep-sixed
the cigars she found in her son's pockets, and sent
unsuspecting orphans to Jesuit schools.
Disdaining artists, no doubt, as shiftless fools
and portraits as the fruit of sinful vainglory,
she sat for a talented nobody who needed the work,
paid him (promptly and in full),
and recommended him to a beplumed neighbor

whose face hangs, perhaps, on the opposite wall –
whose white throat and red lips convey nothing at all.

Some people simply cannot tell a story.