Art Museum

An open letter to art museums.

Art museum, take me back in time. But let me get up close to your paintings because that's where I feel kindred spirits most. Show me your mistakes, your changed lines, your desperate erasings. Show me your doubts & lyrical passages & crinkle marks where it was all ripped from its bindings & mounts & tossed across the studio in anger. Show me the backs, too, where friends' street addresses are written on stretchers, Rue this & Via that. Let me see your ghosts coming thru after centuries, figures sacrificed at the last minute for King Composition. Show me your craquelure, your gallery tone, your hack restorations & deep inner beauty, flawed in its perfect humanity. But please let me get up close so I can hear them all whispering their secrets. Their secrets just like mine, semaphore from the Past thru the only thing between us, the thin brittle varnish of time.