The Gallery
The Gallery
He stands as they walk by - some stare, most sleepwalk.
School outings and starving artists. The guides do not comment,
There are better works to dissect in this gallery.
Works of masters, madmen, both, crowd the museum.
Stood in a corner, carefully preserved against the ravages
of the ages, the stone man stands.
The plaque extolls his maker's virtues, details his life,
his periods of frenzied (largely forgotten) effort,
his inevitable demise.
Though the stone man's name adorns the top of the plaque
(Not mine, he thinks. He DOES think. Not mine, the one given me)
it is an afterthought, an homage to a dead man.
There are better examples of his work, so the stone man
stands alone, unremarked and unremarkable,
through the endless weary days.
In the blink of a stone eye evening falls.
The patrons go to their dinners, their assignations,
their lives beyond the walls of the museum.
The curator makes his rounds, clipboard in hand.
He stares longer than his usual allotment at the stone man,
makes a note with soft, manicured hands.
The stone man knows that look. His time under the
unblinking spotlights is is at an end.
Sometime soon the men with the crate will come
and he will be gone from this world.
No pallbearers these, only men with a job,
tasked with hauling the stone man away to be forgotten.
Another play unfolds in the endless parade before
his unblinking stone eyes, curator to security guard,
guard to telephone, checkmate.
Into this dismal show steps the star,
prima to each night's ballet -
The security guards may pass in their rounds,
the curator in his orbit, but She is his companion,
the light in each night.
As the curator speaks to her the stone man
watches her eyes change as she takes another slight,
another blow in a lifetime's worth.
Her friend is leaving.
The curator may leave the board now.
His deadly move is made, his part played.
Alone at last.
She takes up her mop, her dusters and rags,
every one a veteran of a thousand heartaches,
endless disappointments, cruelties great and small.
What else in the offing when she has spent a lifetime
cleaning up other people's messes, being the solution
to other people's problems, her heart bruised and bloody
from a world too callous for the gentle?
Tonight the other works can wait. Tonight she must see
her friend on his way.
His stone heart cracks as her gentle touch
clears away the dust of another day's mild,
unthinking neglect, as she speaks again of happier days,
again and for the last time.
What coroner, what undertaker ever saw so deeply
into their night's work, gave such care to the contents
of their respective crates?
A life in the imagination to replace the one outside her head
has made them friends, allies against the endless, meaningless,
bludgeoning truths of a world with little use for either of them,
but no matter how clever her imagination may be,
she cannot imagine the gallery without her stony companion.
The lights are harsher tonight, the air more chill,
the shadows menacing as they close in, precious time
growing shorter with every stroke of her duster.
The one-sided conversations of countless nights pass
through both their minds, the endless turbulence of her life
finding comfort in the stoic, enduring sameness of his,
his static, imprisoned existence softened by the wild,
vital freedom of hers, and each thinks,
if only.
If only you were real.
If only I were free.
If only we could.
And for a moment they want, they wish
for once in this too-long life
oh please...
Her half hopeful, half despairing eyes,
welling with a lifetime's tears seek his
as within that stone heart the prisoner shrieks
and beats himself against the bars
the gods of the gallery watch
a tentative step up onto the marble plinth
callused, chapped hands encircling a marble chest
hot salt tears on a cold stone shoulder.
Who knows how it happened?
Somewhere in a moment of pristine sorrow
of tragic beauty
a bargain is struck that even a museum's small gods
might smile upon; and somehow there is no surprise,
only a sense of completeness
as a marble man becomes more alive,
as a raw, bleeding heart gathers strength from a stone one,
as hard arms encircle soft shoulders
to draw the beloved close.
The exchange, while of import to a curator's jaded eye,
goes largely unremarked. The stone man has gone to
whatever Tartarus awaits forgotten statuary,
the new piece delivered and installed in it's new home.
His cold, beautiful clockwork world proceeds with
mathematical precision.
The new piece may meet with consternation, even
controversy - but how better to perform his singular office?
There is something in this piece to stir the soul,
a sublime expression reserved for only the finest works.
Surely even the most sour matron could not fault the perfection
of this flawless image, preserved for eternity,
a kiss for the ages, an embrace to shape the dreams of lovers,
ensconced and enshrined here, in his temple, in
the gallery.