space—is it formally prohibited to walk the length

of the gallery floor with a hollow in your bag precisely

the dimensions of Rembrandt’s only seascape?

Mocking the bag-check protocol helps me forget

about the tavern scene with the bullet holes right

through it, how it continued to be shown and did

its display of damage make it more valuable or less.

Give them what they want. But what do they want?

Ultimately, I find this place to be a fully predatory

city. Electric fences, post-op sepsis, the insult

NO ONE EVER SAW HER FIRST. You can’t even stand

and wait for your train without someone suffering

from an acute case of undercongratulation

praying for you to shuffle to the edge of the platform

and teeter over, so that he might intervene and be seen

as a savior. Moving through an intersection

the other day, I passed a young child who was deep

in a screaming fit: NO NO NO NO, and I suddenly

suspected the child was me—the child I used to be,

transported somehow ahead and horrified

to find what the future brings. She did have my eyes.

Really, though, I’m losing track of time. In the film

depicting a bygone war, everything feels

like the future, even the scene where a luminous

woman appears in a doorframe and all the troops

goggle and shove: OUT OF MY WAY—OUT OF MY WAY—

I SAW HER FIRST. People are so preoccupied

with looks. I remember how the tract against suicide

posited exposure to art and plants as antidote

to despair, making the argument that beauty will buoy

the hopeless. What a jab at the scarlet moss

and slender pine of the woods, at hundreds of years

of portraiture and plein air. I take it they just weren’t

pretty enough to convince anyone to abandon

their plans. I take it NO ONE EVER SAW THEM FIRST.

Spotting a man in a flat wool cap with lines at his eyes

and mouth, I thought, that’s how my friend D

will look in ten years. Then I realized—no, that’s what

he looks like now. I am losing track of time. I can’t

even view a painting anymore without picturing

its future: knife-marks, singes, punctures in the canvas,

patches of varnish half-eaten by splatters of lye.

Of course that’s hardly the full extent of the methods—

I’ve been meaning to learn them all, but I’m afraid

to read any further on the subject, even though I know

it’s childish to fear reading. It’s like being scared

by a movie, needing water but hesitating to enter

the kitchen, having hours earlier watched someone

get it in a gray room, awl through the neck—

Ultimately, it’s a mystery why anyone would choose

to visit a museum, to accumulate more and more

images they’ll only end up begging to forget.