The Thin Museum
Verse by William Dennis
Paintings by Michael Guinn
Gallery 3
"...that everything temporal is false,
and that only the abstract is real." – Leo Tolstoy |
Tolstoy GirlAs I watch, the future beams straight in.
Right off, it sets your breasts at abstract angles and puts a sine wave in your russet hair, and makes you better—marvelous…and modern. A window frames, behind your un-shrugged shoulder, such cloudy views as yesterday affords-- back when I didn't even know your name; the future's where I can't see what you are. Hope's vague suggestions clothe and furnish you, sufficient to the instant that is now. You're all entropic, broadcast evolution, scarcely grasped by any tiny present. I spend my little moment now and then, till you, as women do, put forth a hand. |
Perseus Reflects My younger self seems willful now, detached,
Impatience on a pedestal, more cutting, less incisive, mouthing, over-matched by opportunity—too quick at shutting. When passion damped her hair to tousled snakes.., her face, remembered, still can turn me stone; it's proved: a heart that's changed to marble breaks-- I struck, as boys strike out, and fled alone. Licking greenly from their votive pot, these sessile swords assist the self-impalement vegetating memory makes my lot, struck through with sickening health, where youth was ailment. Nimble as a nymph, and quick as wit-- my back was turned—she must have let me do it. |