Current
Issue
Volume 12.2
Nico Amador
—
Period Art
At the museum,
I said I didn’t need more atonement.
The previous centuries have leaned too hard
on the same conceit: the cross to bear,
the body lashed to virtue, holy ghosts—
and for what?
Living is brief indulgence. You were.
We agreed the end is better this way:
an unsanctimonious exit
(one of us on a flight to Madrid) heat and apology
dissipating with the plane’s vaporous speech.
No Baroque excess.
Neither of us claiming sainthood.
The next morning I wake early
inside unfamiliar quarters, light echoing
something you’d said once
about ambivalence, the artist’s restless impulse
to keep climbing toward their next object.
I reach for a notebook as though it were a prop.
I’m post-something.
Alone in bed. In a future without you.
There, next to the theater,
a man pulls near enough to kiss
but doesn’t. We don’t.
Wooden shutters open
to the dominion of these public trees
and I realize why I confuse casualness
with intimacy. My shirt is on
but the vibration reads otherwise:
Eyelash. Eucalyptus.
Both observed with great attention
and anticipated feeling.
His friends are on a train from Granada.
We coffee instead of lunch, part
with a loosely promised later.
I’m reminded—remind myself—
not to wait or think that waiting is kind
to the hopeful, a mistake I’ve made before.
I accept myself as one amidst many potentials.
Attachment, as a clumsy event.
It sticks to me like a turbid list of priors.
A little bird shit on the solarium.
But tonight, at ten o’clock, I’ll tap
on his door, available for whatever finds me—
a voice that says, again, come in.
Despite this.
The upper half of the city’s
architecture, the sky’s tonnage
constrained to these triangles.
Arousal at the surface. New.
Despite the impressionistic
rooftops, the real bees
weaving through the jacarandas.
Despite walking.
Despite distance, replacement.
A clear weather and yet
everything comes back to me
with your blue signature on it.
Like a painter’s catalogue
I keep revisiting. Blue one and two.
Blue of sweaters
and fatigue.
The day pretends
to be about its own activity
while I perseverate.
(Even the hair on my face
reminds me of your touch).
I circle back to the gallery.
On one wall, a lone swimmer
lengthens into the shape of contentment.
On another, men lounge briefly
in a burnished pasture, their sheep close as clouds.
Night falls under a description that has yet
to be articulated.
What comes after—
I don’t think we can know it.
The mood of one period only background for the next.
We move on. We tire of ourselves.
Desire, like the artist’s inspiration,
is nothing owned or owed. Sometimes it’s given to us.
Truthfully, you wouldn’t be moved
by most of these portraits, would skim my letters
with affectionate boredom, too.
Sleep, you’d say.
So I take the afternoon to nap.
Find a quiet perch to have a drink
and watch the handsome locals file down the street
in navy suits, like I would.
I’ve done that now, and now an invitation stands.
I venture out. I climb a set of stairs.
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