***
Sometimes I spend lunches in galleries,
alone with Flemish or Italian rarities.
I’d sit in quietude
before a canvas
or a statue
for minutes.
In love with silence of such lunch periods.
Lunch time behind the mauve curtains,
along with Rubens or Botticelli:
women at their most,
the drapery, the medallions
bespoke the tenderness, the tactfulness
of those Renaissance females.
The search for beauty during lunch
is bound to take me constantly
across religious and moral lines,
I wonder if I could learn
the names of all the saints
by heart?
The inspiration
outside the Place Royale inhabits
Brussels.
I realise I’ve travelled through Europe
seeing more eyes
than churches and museums,
the cathedrals built by small men
have escaped my focus,
weren’t they worthy of a notice?
To seduce the Gothic or Baroque cathedrals,
of Reins, Amiens or Rome,
All those ruined abbeys and theatres in Florence or Paris?
Like smoke letters of an airplane
your words
pronounce the park, the theatre, the pines,
but what I only hear is your timbre,
I’m standing in the gallery beside a canvas
or in a park beside you,
turning myself into a catalogue –
making the records of a beauty
that can be easily destroyed
by time
or in Armageddon.
A quick sharp step
over the marble
of the long hall of porticos –
your sudden smile
feels like a drama
of a Greek writer,
the chirping of crickets outside,
the hot silence,
I am decapitated:
I see you
entering the gallery
to slip into the chair beside me,
to show me the painting of Jacopo
Pontormo,
to observe
the hands of mine and on the canvases,
a curious sensation
that you might be
my tangible reality,
my only tangible,
my only silhouette
to be embraced and be dissolve in,
my maritime tree.
