Written by Michael Wu.
The Burgher captured the alien school shrouded in a ferry, then wrung. Remembered peace lives in each dabble of the heart—I tell him—and he goes still, till then that friend is silent. For all he fishes on, my green feet tap few meters away from certain secrets which remain impressions, for no passion drains them true. Then fanciful thoughts, still untrue. But what is false—I see them in the distance.
Two women laughed by. A dolphin showered by ships of wave. Two mermaids emerge from the womb. Only younger a Degas’ dancer, and the ancients frowned at Picasso, not Picasso, only her face he folded onto another cara—
—Like a cow, my brother used to say. Two dancers were having the last dance in front of us—the fun already draining, so far away from home.
Picasso is kind of a minimalist, don’t you think?
He is a kind of friend.
But then who is she— Have you seen an overcomplicated woman in a straw hat— or does she wear a gray plumed hat— Isn’t she the one view of Amsterdam? Oh.
But then is she friend or foe? She could hear the winter.
And upon the sight of morning awakes, she disappears in a vanish. Leaving her son, Paul, clinging to a monk.
Oh, a tale, Father, hath said this little one
Sun washes the pastures, his holiness lone
All but thin, so sung sunk the sanctioned tone.
I have said so many upon you, chalked the old bones,
Young years, have you not found your own?
The choir boy looks down at his tethered feet.
The monk was hopeful.
You are now free—I am opening the door to a little cave
Or bedded you are thrice spared a fate.
It was just not through meeting that
water can drift. Fire learns colors from rain.
Yet the child became more and more anxious,
I cannot love, Father.
The candle of sky is always there tall, blooming.
And taken toll that star hath made into me
I confess it all.
—whence a flesh forged in the hourly shame
To love all that was me, animal in a cave
—whence made my gaze into the ordinary flame, perhaps it questions the nature of its burn, because it folded. Like the life well lived, soon this ignition sneaks under the eye, gone within the glow. It snuck into the rotting of this pride, crawled through.
Now I covet another grain of this house of earth.
I didn’t listen—laid on the grass, still thinking of that woman earlier—I can’t stand nakedness. My friend pokes. The standing Nudes, he says— yes, I know bathers in the Borromean Islands don’t care but they should. I am running out of words—The horror, my lady, my mower, my mover, my sunset millet. And the modest sheep’s gone away. I am still a herd, a landscape, La Tonte des tonte. And I fold sails in Bordeaux over me. I am going to sleep—
Before someone pulls off my sheets; someone no longer my friend:
— It’s Lépine, lépine! I get confused and ask. Who is? The Seine. He is the all of Seine. If I had my bowler hat and my cane, I imagine I would become quite the view of fortification—then I could slumber in this art museum, in Hiroshima. But the thought—I sneak back my scarf for a laugh. 1893, I was too handsome for 1893. I forget all about the dots. Sit in Daubigney’s garden. The white rose don’t really smile. Nothing really smell. “But she is Love?” Amor, Aphrodite, and Venus and Ishtar, child, they are all true. That I had laid eyes on all of them, on each promenade. So a door is open, where the gallery was first built in 1978. Sin walks in and crouches. Seashells, mon amour, meine Liebe, it’s still a little cynical of him. It fishes for frogs. I stand under him and melt into the seam.
*This piece is dedicated to the Hiroshima Museum of Art, and the many references to it may be found here: https://www.hiroshima-museum.jp/collection/inc/pdf/on_display_20241102-.pdf.
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