It is in moving underground, looking above at the glass pyramid that was only built in my youthful visit to this city, that I can be transported to another time. No, it is not with the wings of the headless angel that moves me so, but with the swift step through vine-like exhibits, a world of art, of aching, a world so akin the Central Park palace of sculpture gardens and green roofs that grew me. So overflowing with spirits are the walls, that I am taken aback by a million photographers looking to remember themselves in so sacred of place. I am taken aback by their pristine postures beside fallen angels, the broken, battered faces of Divinci's wives.
It is an overwhelming space, so full with bent bodies, so styled by sharper times. It is a world of corpses, of lurid, limp, luscious limbs come undone. It is a world of serpeants embraced by their architects and the very faces of our gods. For me in this winding world of halls, no mirrors but others' eyes to look upon, there is a menagerie of hands. Even on the winged creatures that crawl under my skin, those hands hold tight to each other, all that is left at the end of each era. In piles, in grappling for a painted story, or for a woman left alone by time.
No wonder I am exhausted by the thought of sterility, of clean places that hold such troubled pasts. Before, it was always whales, that giant under which I saw stuffed, encased time, silken hides of sand stood next to those yellowed eyes, so like the wolves I had watched for from my windowpane. There the love I had anticipated, anguished, abandoned. There the felt of fountains that told untrue futures, fetted with some kind of peace.
And now it is the fingers I see that I want to bring back to life, to re-blush with breathe and murmured beating. To caress back into being, slide along my wrists, human strings of music, both silenced and now seen as mute. I can finally understand the longing to go back, , to unsettle the mourned, to link their fingers, their stories somehow into our own. To make men, as we do mistakes, at once ours and everlasting.