At the Gallery

After “En La Galleria” (1991) by Santiago Carbonell

Finally at the gallery, the couple (all fiction of them),
she in that white bustier, he with the cutout
look of a dandy, his fedora as if caught in dreams
of another century; she with that thick black
belt made to hold the waist in, the one that will
grow with the truth, and the red corduroy, and her
body doing that thing, you know, one hip going up
and the other down, to look alluring. When the viewer
is the art and the art is me or my tribe, this is how
we blacks are framed, lurking in charcoal lines
and untidily fragmented, the lines random,
and the work to reflect reality undermined by
the shifting forces of our century. This is not art,
this is the slightly open curtain, the window looking
out to a dark wet night, and I am filled with the burden
of sorrow of the kind that a man has no words for, no words
to describe the inexplicable fear that his love has changed
her mind and chosen to place every single one
of his canvasses in the cellar. Her lurid walls
are now covered with the random art she’s picked up
at yard sales; and she gives no explanations for this,
though he asks and asks in so many different ways.
It is not you and me standing together before the wall —
those are fictions as I said before. Of course, it is
us in the way that we colonize art, and for every crack
curving down the wall I see a loose strap of a dress
dangling delicately and nakedly from your shoulder.
We live in a world of stains, a world of broad
strokes and thin lines, and the masks of despondence.