In the Gallery of No One's Home
A boy answers the door, though no one knocked
and the door hadn’t asked a question.
Outside, sun is everywhere and gorgeous, the kind of sun
one might imagine while masturbating if indeed
one thought of suns that way. Inside, ten dim spotlights
do their best to illume each sort of framed intention:
obligatory boat adrift against a ravaged sky;
brown rabbit with leather cord knotted at his neck;
curly-locked, doe-eyed girl
who evermore saw herself
outside the painting with those same
silken ringlets, those ruminant orbs,
even though her hair went to seed
after her first pregnancy.
There is no uniform answer for why
the boy returns to the gallery, sits
on its single hard bench, gazes and gazes,
and sometimes hums, but I like to think
it is the girl who keeps him there—the ribbon
in her hair unspooling like a siren song,
her eyes asking nothing of him, except to see.