Islands

The modern and contemporary gallery

at Yale with the tessellated ceiling opens 

to a perfect, rectangular vault where massive 

Postwar canvases hang like idols of the Self

illuminated by spotlights on tracks. A man 

sits before a Rothko, bespectacled, scanning 

the museum catalog on his phone. I’m here 

to see the recent acquisitions, go somewhere 

in front of "Islands No. 4," a modest grid

just over a foot square. Ovals the color of 

milk or lotion hover above ground darkening 

sequentially toward the boundaries of each cell, 

of which there are six pairs, symmetric, variable. 

Or is it a gauze thrown over pale horizons 

stacked atop one another ad infinitum? 

How is it that unified fields are created 

by differentiation? I sway forward and 

back, teetering between figure and ground, sensing 

the possibility of some third position, 

some novel relation, or the familiar

stirrings of detachment. As though to punctuate 

this detachment, the bespectacled man drags his

two fingers over the bare skin of my shoulder.

His asking “Have you seen Woody Allen’s 'Play it 

Again, Sam?'” is not unlike a slap sending me

back to my mute poles, narrow eyes as he resumes.

"I want a photograph of you by the Pollock;

you remind me of the bird Woody flirts with.

He asks what she feels and she says, ‘social collapse,

spiritual desolation, the vacuum of 

reality,’ just blathering on about it.

He then asks, ‘What are you doing Saturday night?’ 

‘Committing suicide.’" Half a beat. "He replies, 

‘What about Friday night?’ I’d caption the photo

‘Life imitates art’ and share it with my circle.” 

I examine his readers’ magnifying lines,

the thin blue islands of his face, breathe out, “No, but 

thank you for that charming anecdote,” regretting 

the rote smile I presented and not disturbing 

the gallery’s quiet, reasoned ambivalence.

I should have said, “You want inside my oval. 

You think I’m not having a sincere encounter 

with this Agnes Martin,” before snapping his lenses. 

But, leaving "Islands," I see his wide, assured stance, 

open mouth sucking air in half-suppressed laughter. 

I think of Film Noir Man from Best Video  

who pinched and held my tricep in line at checkout,

and Lean Hooded Boy on the subway who thrust his 

scarred face in my face as I wrote, said, “Nice scriptures.” 

They don’t all intend to degrade me but they do. 

Men need their subtle and explicit violence. 

It is the reason they exist. Women exist 

to issue men an object and long in secret

for their use. I don’t want to believe this. How much 

life is decided by forces beyond one's will?

Who would I be with all that time lost in white space,

or a line, or underground, or in whatever 

expanse thrums behind the taupe shroud of the body?