Trompe L’oeil at the Museum published in Constellations Journal Winter 2022-23
Many thanks to the Editor Nina Rubinstein Alonso for publishing my poem in Volume 12 of Constellations, a beautiful collections of poems and a fine looking journal.
I blink you are gone.
I trail after the first reasonable thought —
you have gone ahead to the roof garden.
I search galleries
where we scrutinized
the illusion of something there
which is just paint
but each room is empty.
Still not worried I climb to the roof ready to laugh
when the doors open
and you will be circling the garden sculptures:
a diapered baby, larger-than-life,
and a woman flinging her head over the wall.
I feel the baby might cry, its fat legs, pop.
The woman might follow her anguish down.
As I go down.
Back to the first gallery where I last saw you.
Back to the paper knives playing cards the wasp
that seems to fly off the grapes.
It is not a large museum so how could I lose you, tall as you are?
I, like Zeuxis, cannot draw back the tattered curtain.
The eye deceives the I Were you ever
more than a momentary look
in the wrong direction?