She gathered up
what rags were left,
what discards
she imagined
she could fool
us into thinking she had
searched the
world to find –
those
correlative objectives
(she liked inverting
Eliot’s phrase)
that might
suggest some ways in which
her mind was
odd and wonderful.
Is this
performance art? What isn’t?
She knew her tattered
scraps
were woebegone,
their colors either
garish or too
dirty to be anything but grey,
their conditions
so beyond resuscitation
she would have
to put them on
in such
bewildering profusion
that our blank
confusion at the mix
would keep us
just sufficiently at bay
to think that
maybe what she wore
she had
intended to convey
the existential
meanings of the trash,
the vast morass
of life. After all, the point
of art was
posing through that strife.
Supposing, if
against the odds, that she
could sway us
to believing that her
mission served her
gods – that we owed
her, anyway, at
least a nod of serious
attention and
respect, perhaps she could
succeed in her
desired effect.
After all, the
point of art was pose,
to put on shows
with tatters, untied bows
and unexpected
glows. And there
were glows. We hadn’t banked on those.
.
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