"Tiny hatches, if you make enough of them, make
an entire etching move," you told us while we smoked
in the lit cave of your Tuesday 1-2:15. We scratched
our pens: dance & film posters, flyers to end the war.
In our famous jeans we slouched before your podium & slides weaving
the movements & the solo trips.
"He was lonely." "She had no patron."
"Scale extends us & reins us in," you said of the strange Piranesis.
"Find the heart of a city by stepping in."
My alleys & arcades pressed onto the copperplate of my 20-year-old brain
fusing its hemispheres. I hitched to Colmar and found
the Isenheim Altarpiece, figures on the old panels aflame, then turned
my back on all religions because you'd shown us Goya's firing squad
& Daumier's gutters where people looked for water.
"Movement in a painting is important as Dante."
I've looked for Dante's houses, cafés, notebooks, & horse-stalls, & someone
always says Oh, you mean The Poet.
"The body doesn't make sense by itself," you said, pointing the red-tip
wand at the chalky nudes of Ingres. If I am lonely
in any town whose museum
treasures its one Whistler or Bonnard, I stand before the image
hear your voice; my eyes
un-scroll, I lift
again like a hinge.
Copyright © 2011 by Judith Vollmer. Used with permission of the author.