SOMETHING’S MISSING IN THIS MUSEUM by Terri Witek
When texts about paintings try to reach each other across space, pages that query how we experience art become poetic experiments in seeing/reading. What clings to what on these page walls? And do paintings from other centuries (older materialities, differently-moving) themselves re-make each other through their almost touch? Are we momentarily part of a painting when we consider such things? And what’s the changing position of the museum which poses us by country, by technique, by year and by foot pattern? In Something’s Missing in This Museum, the subjects are love, torture, transaction and time.
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Wound Kissed on its Shell-Like
Who first claimed the wound couldn’t hear?
Maybe day drumming gray past the sills.
Maybe traffic’s metronomic erase.
A new surmise: the wound was really an eye.
Vibrations vanished along with stinky,
tube-popping washes.
Visits were triaged now
in opulent tide baths of color,
the wound laid out like a porn star.
Dawn again.
Would the wound never close?
From the surface, where everything happens,
the wound spirocheted back
its first tunneling translations.
Somewhere, família.
Somewhere, an army.
Vermeer
Table is wound. Globe is wound — that country where your hand rests is the throb
of it. You have a fingering thought and it’s wound.
Chair is bent and slower wound, floor is unseen so it’s flood not wound
but thread canyons are wound — vine-bloomed drape at that fold
where you grip its slide over table. Second degree wound, then, or third:
air gone wound as you pass through it, wound the room where you pause and
pause. You look away, light — light wounds.