After The Exhibition [revised]

after D. J.

Excuse me, Mister Judd?
I just couldn’t help overhearing
The silence in your latest work,
Untitled. It reminds me of a rainbow
In cross-section, freeze-dried and preserved
In monochrome, mounted but as yet unlabeled.
I’m as confounded as you, but when will you go
And see your stepmother at the Home?
She misses your piano playing.

You claim your hands will never touch
This sculpture, the ladder rungs by which
You could ascend to Euclid’s perfect world,
The only provable universe, if it existed.
So won’t you draw a picture for your daughter?
Today she especially loves butterflies.

Your desire to be and not seem—it’s as if to say,
Perhaps God’s bathroom could use some shelving.
A suggestion devoid, of course, of specific toiletries
(Which cleanser for the Necessary Being?):
Just green brass ledges for the Almighty’s loofah
And accoutrements, which I sincerely hope you celebrate
By letting your English terrier sleep on the bed.
Does he whimper at the door?

Somewhere beneath the exhibit, then,
Must be the shower drain, leaking into the earth,
Into the dirt of your garden uptown.
Your wife, who cannot help but put one second
Before the other, would so very much like
To tend it with you by her side, clutching the weeds
Through garden gloves and gauging the fresh headway
Made by the budding leaves which, Occam’s Razor aside,
Really are there, Donald, which occupy
The space between each of your boxes.