I had an optimistic number of condoms in my wallet
when we set off looking for women at The Met.
Shawn had showed me Youtube videos of these men,
Pick-Up Artists, who broke the social hems
we had devoutly set against ourselves.
They seduced women in three gestures.
They didn’t introduce themselves
or talk about what they did for a living.
They took the ladies' hands, swept them up, kissed them.
The women seemed to be thrilled by it,
joy exploding from their faces
in inappropriate, unregulated ways.
We had both tried to be writers.
We read all the books Harold Bloom said need to be read.
It didn't get us laid.
We agreed that art was something of a ploy,
a roundabout way to get the attention of women.
Did the world need another narcissistic kunstlerroman?
Was it proper to spend your youth alone
at a desk in a room re-envisioning your life
so it all came out in your favor?
Shawn said writers were the ultimate chodes.
Why not charge directly into life instead?
Living was the new art.
Everything is available to us
if we conquer our self-imposed neurosis,
our guilt, and take it.
We were loud and brash on the subway uptown,
I told Shawn I had a whole bandolier of condoms,
I was going on a Fuck Spree.
He laughed painfully.
When we got off the train
we found that The Met was not the place
for young ladies on a Friday afternoon.
The women were too old or too young:
pushing strollers or riding in them.
We were stuck looking at art instead.
In the Roman gallery, the threatening dicks
of the statues had been snapped off
by the criticism of twenty centuries
(Time: the harshest critic!).
The Renaissance revealed the most intimate moments of women:
Two men watching a mother pinch her breast
to the eager mouth of a babe,
the nipple near a candleflame
framed in the center of a crisp oil painting.
(To the baby, the nipple is the center of life.
To us, it had been relocated a foot or so below.)
Shawn said the museum gave him Old Man Energy.
He said Raphael was into Fatties.
We came to the room where Degas was
inventing the confidential girls of our modern age.
Girls had never been orange before his
with the ibis' perched on their shoulders
burning into the sunset like blush.
Degas' brushes sang:
Dance across the practice rooms,
you afternoon ladies,
to the twinkling ghost
of the player piano.
Dance taunting in wilted tutus, you spirits,
hair strapped in obedient buns,
deadly eyes locked on polaroid cameras.
Degas eavesdropping on white skin,
a bare shoulder, a toe lifting a body
into air.
Degas' brushes sang:
Dance against the intentions of boys,
you orange ladies,
you are powder blasts of skin
dissolving into the air,
hiding all around us
in rows of scissored legs!
Degas brushes sang:
Women are life
and birth rebellion!
Shawn asked me if I was ready to go yet.
He said he was sorry he ruined my afternoon.
He said going to the museum was a horrible idea.
Every woman that came near made us silent.
We apologized to each other for continuing to be
our failed little selves.
On the subway there was a pretty girl sitting alone.
Shawn’s posture changed.
Something took over that was not words.
He sat next to her.
I watched their reflection in the glass
as they had a pleasant conversation.
It seemed like a miracle.
I had nothing to do.
I stood there, like people do on the train,
in suspended animation,
not quite remembering how to dream
and doing it with as little offense as possible.
