No one has died yet.
Or, not the man and the woman
who walk through the Garden
of Remembrance, with its
hyacinths legion in the new
spring, bronze swans lifting off
paused in air. But the couple
has not come
for this. They have come
to see the artist’s studio,
the one recreated,
mess-wild, in the museum—
sheaves of paper on the floor
he tore from books:
photos of wars, Muybridge’s horses.
Only Plexiglass kept the two
from entering, the man’s hands
pressed to it as they looked in.
It’s like that, she thinks,
all those hundreds
of brushes, tins of paint, newspapers,
boxes, dust. Something, someday
will make it cohere: the canvas
suddenly soaked, the rictal faces
blooming—