What would they think today 
of the National Gallery 
with its forty-foot banners 
 
and Mona Lisa coffee mugs, 
its fridge magnets and postcards, 
with its two-hour lines 

for yesterday's upholstery, 
while whole rooms full of Titians, 
Dürers, and Della Francescas 

go empty except for a guard 
creaking the varnished floor, 
or maybe a troop of girl scouts 

giggling their way past the Apollos? 
What could they think but 
Good? Art sells in this New World. 

Vermeer, glancing up from 
his account books, tallying 
a shipment of premium lager, 

might smile in his opaque way, 
but the whole boatload of the rest—   
Franz Hals with his outflung gaze, 
 
pinch-faced Blake, Rembrandt 
duded up as a splendid biker 
with tattoos and silver nose studs

—all would no doubt arrive 
and head straight for the hoopla, 
some to spear it with their pens, 

others to marvel at the acrylics 
or the giant Oldenburg. They'd elbow 
the likes of you and me aside, 

with our dutiful tapes and earphones, 
they'd squabble all morning 
over posters in the gift shop. 

Surely they'd know this palace 
of art is more than its cash registers 
and blazing sun-white bathrooms, 

but nothing much without them. 
If some refused to tour these galleries 
it wouldn’t be haughty disdain

but that this motley world of ours
wasn't finished amazing them—  
I see DaVinci, say, stalled on the mall

studying the reflecting pool, 
sketching buses, frisbees, and jets 
banking wondrously over the Potomac.
                        

1. Self-Portrait about 1657. Scottish National Gallery

He was more than a decade younger
than I am now, I suddenly realize— 
just fifty-one years old, with one of
those time-haunted, gloomy gazes
he gave so often to the future. We’ve
no idea what he was thinking. Perhaps
nothing beyond the play of light
and shadow across his deep-wrinkled,
fleshy face, the way a few wisps 
of hair escaping his dark brown cap
catch a bit of light amid the murk,
how that tiny highlight balances
the composition with its trust in
the ordinary. How his plain face 
is most of what we see, emerging 
from fathomless dark like memory,
briefly unsure of itself as we all
are, just a face like any other, maybe
not happy or sad but thoughtful,
just one of us in soft fading light.


2. After Robert Hayden’s “Monet’s Waterlilies”

Today the news from Orlando and Aleppo
infects the air like burning rubber.
Why do I gaze so hungrily again
on Rembrandt’s calm and sad self-portrait?

He was no light unto himself
yet his head endlessly emerges
from thick-textured gloom.
His meaning, if any, evades us,
yet his look is placid, resigned, direct.

O wrinkled, time-scarred long-gone face,
saggy flesh and worry lines illuminated
like a moonlit rock. Here is the look
that sees us all somehow. Here is love
that, asking nothing, asks all.