Pastorals in the Atrium

The tour has only started when I’m ambushed by that flat-lined verdigris I’d know even as a stumbling sleepwalker:landschap with tin river, cleaver of sodden pastures — marvelous for painters, says the docent, was the enormity of the sky, rarely cloudless, and she’s already turning to an Italian hillscape when I say wait! this is my bloodstream, as my finger makes brief unintended contact with the canvas, and then my voice an ambulance I tell her there should be a diagram to indicate the grazing motion, how the grinding molars of the Holsteins make the river go — or else, self-portrait in the glassing-over eye of a stickleback caged in a jam jar, left too long in the sun — but now the river is across the room because the docent has ushered me toward an upholstered bench and is murmuring, sit, sit, I have here from the staff room a coffee, here you are — and I’m making the gesture for no, those fields I ate and was made of live in me, uncloseable parentheses