At the Met to Get Wrecked
by Shane Neilson
I wander the monuments in the Empire State and do not think
of victims, per se; larceny, per se; scale, per se. I’m hurting –
I just want to not be part of something, this thing; I want a good,
beautiful song. In the Met are the good things, endowments
that purchase the painted flowers, the nude female bodies,
but these form the detritus of time – privilege fanning itself,
saying: I take, and take, and take, me o my o me o my – therefore
perfect for the Empire State and its crowds. No. I gravitate
to one sad and broken scene reproduced over and over – the family.
How to take in The Family as objet? How does one scan Manets?
Degases? Van Goghs? One does, if one is pulled to canvases
with families. Forgotten – bare flesh, epic combat scenes, landscapes.
Then I see: the fatherless, the motherless, scene with children aged
like mine – Picasso’s “La Coiffure.” Do you know why you stood
at the altar, really? Isn’t there mystery at the core of metaphor?
I was summoned here to not-understand, to wonder at how the children
are comfortable with each other. A domesticity of foreground, no home
or other life; the boy’s face at an odd slant, as if he, too, is tilted at the angle
of the world, and the girls so carefully grooming beauty – the eldest
arranging the middle child’s hair, the middle child holding onto a blank
mirror with both hands. I could tell you we’re the lack of background,
we’re the mirror that won’t reflect; more ekphrasis can be done. But
my problem’s here: the entire regiment of my body wants to protect
these children, to let them be with one another unharmed; but I would
want to be background, and that would ruin the picture. I love you,
my family! It is love that I feel, with every rough gesture and word!
May I save you? I may not, there is no background for that. Que sera,
Doris Day sings to my son’s temporal lobes, Que sera. There’s only
the boy in his own self, disinterested in his sisters and the background,
and yet parallel to them. Is he sad? is my constant question and worry.
What does he know? Does he know more than me? He is in the picture,
next to beauty – closer than I will ever get, protected.
Shane Neilson is a disabled poet, physician, and critic who lives in Oakville. His Dysphoria (PQL, 2017) was awarded the Hamilton Literary Award for Poetry in 2018 and New Brunswick won a best book award from The Miramichi Reader in 2020. He is the festival director of the AbleHamilton Poetry Festival. His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, the Walrus, and Verse Daily.