Three for Tea

13 rooms fashioned in a time machine,
the relationship between magic and beauty building
until we collapse on the curved wooden bench,
golden slatted tree hearts carrying our weight,
facing Picabia’s transparencies; eyes twitching then closed.

You tumble at last with face pinned to the glass
admiring Duchamp’s chess set and his headiness
to give it all up for the game, moving pawns
through invisible patterns garnered in both minds,
ten steps ahead of time and space.

We emerge from the end of the tunnel into splintered light, its sudden lift
at once weary and heavy, pushing us down the escalator
through color blocked art we’d never witness. Descention brings
silence, no words equaling the imprints now in cells.
Our bodies part directions at the bottom.

I find you leaning over the rail outside the doors,
the glass towering above you, monolithic, and the fag
in your hand souring the air, the smoke pulls me closer.
I dream of suffocating the images, tweezing each color and form
from between sluiced gray matter with precision.

We curl our chests over together, watch relatives struggle
to push their fat, crippled kin up steep ramps from the underbelly.
The pompous rapid language of French pre-teens, intermittent with laughter,
tells how unsettled they are in their skins; how we all fit that
shame in one lifetime or another.

Our elbows touch point-to-point, inhaling and then out
love still molding and shaping its way onto blank canvas;
colors being chosen carefully, meticulous to a fault,
because some things cannot be erased.

Aleathia Drehmer 2008

Published by Clutching at Straws 2/10