The Door
After the painting “That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do (The Door)” by Ivan Albright, Art Institute of Chicago, completed 1941
The train wires quivering in the wind, I cannot see
their origin, what they supply, for whom—
but when I’m on the subway car alone, I think of the twin
blue soaps on the sink’s cracked shelf—how you love
that they match, how I know that you love this.
Married, the script crusts in the hamper, launders
in the air. In the Art Institute together I watch other couples
and guess the age of their love
from how they look at the art. There was the morning,
a decade ago, in the Warhol—you touched my shoulder
through my coat, enough to pool desire
where I most wanted you to touch me.
Today I watch you hold both my black coat and yours
and it’s difficult to tell the two apart.
This book from my therapist talks about bids
for long loves, an issuance on the wire—in which
I leap from the origin in faith that you’re holding the line.
To begin seduction is a bid, to request more blue soap a bid,
to clean your mirror’s scumming face, knowing
you’ll smile in its shine. To offer a price, or else
decide a sentence. To walk ahead of you in the museum,
your scout, and say, come look at this one, the Albright, the moody colors,
the ringed hand almost out of view—I know you’ll love it.
Albright hoarded the painting’s artifacts for four weeks
and painted them daily for ten years. Perhaps there was a room
in his house where these objects lived and died, the room
where—in time—he didn’t need them anymore: painting
his creation entirely from memory, one square inch per day.
Source: Poetry (September 2023)