HERNAN BAS New and Recent Work
THE GARDENER’S SCARF
Fruitlessly you wait for the gardener to show up on the red bench where he has promised to meet you after his shift ends. You encountered him in the bathroom at the museum, and you followed him back to his botanical garden, crowded with statuary and obelisks, a thick-enough assortment tomake Peggy Guggenheim jealous, if she were alive and peering now through a window at you, who refuse to reciprocate her gaze. Avoidance tactics doom you and determine your fall from competence into a gutter cloggedwith torn back issues of . The sculptures in the gardenhave more solidity—more conviviality—than you do, faded ash-blond melancholy man under a sky too pink for its own good, the pink of a wrestling match held in the white palace on the hill, a villa, where Oliver Reed and Alan Bates will strip and you will not suffer the children to enter Ken Russell’s kingdom of horniness and
