My eyes shifted and glazed over the pictures’ healthiness
Like that of items in a short Safeway ‘Organics’ aisle:
They were well packaged with labels describing their content
And directions for easy use: fashionably low-fat,
Tastefully unsweetened and full of ‘natural’ flavours
i.e. they were yet one more series of Canuck landscapes,
One of which every home should have to extend its sofa(s)
Whose culture of ease the pictures’ manufacturer must
Have worked damned hard to feed and raise like a national flag.
But this second walk through the mausoleum proved to be
Not fruitless: on the way out, i bumped into the round fruit
Of the belly of a woman on her way in, and sensed
Right way that she was Astronomo-Kanamono,
Stewart Galenza’s necessary nuisance, his nemesis,
His hubris’s comeuppance, his humbling no-reason-why
Deliverance from the infantilism of his lusts
And the utter unutterably crass kitsch of his art.
*
Yet, lazily, i almost let the moment’s fruit-bowl pass
But, instead, grasped her arm as though she or i were going
To fall, and she gave me a look of slightly amused scorn
As i apologised more than once for my clumsiness
Before introducing myself and asking if, by chance,
She knew of Stewart or Stew Galenza, another artist.
I was brusque, but my question at an art-museum seemed,
To me, not out of place. So the woman’s reaction was
A shock: she wrenched my arm free of the clasp of my fingers
And pushed me off, while at the same time adjusting her hair,
Her eyes two coals, one cold, one still a glowing ember
(A split common to every mask i’ve failed to see behind).
(from “fatima solagua arterra’s nudes” by Brian Chan)
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 