At the Gallery

After “En La Galleria” (1991) by Santiago Carbonell

Finally at the gallery, the couple (all fiction of them), she in that white bustier, he with look of a dandy, his fedora as if caught in dreams of another century; she with that thick black belt made to hold the waist in, the one that will grow with the truth, and the red corduroy, and her body doing that thing, you know, one hip going up and the other down, to look alluring. When the viewer is the art and the art is me or my tribe, this is how we blacks are framed, lurking in charcoal lines and untidily fragmented, the lines random, and the work to reflect reality undermined by the shifting forces of our century. This is not art, this is the slightly open curtain, the window looking out to a dark wet night, and I am filled with the burden of sorrow of the kind that a man has no words for, no words to describe the inexplicable fear that his love has changed her mind and chosen to place every single one of his canvasses in the cellar. Her lurid walls are now covered with the random art she’s picked up at yard sales; and she gives no explanations for this, though he asks and asks in so many different ways. It is not you and me standing together before the wall — those are fictions as I said before. Of course, it is us in the way that we colonize art, and for every crack curving down the wall I see a loose strap of a dress dangling delicately and nakedly from your shoulder. We live in a world of stains, a world of broad strokes and thin lines, and the masks of despondence.