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Looking at Modern Art
in the Metropolitan Museum
by Edmund Miller
Into the wonderful plastic room
of the Metropolitan Museum
where they stash the modern stuff,
the ambling guard follows.
He hasn’t let them feel
the pink tapestries of Croome Court
or run their fingers through
the grillwork grapes
of that perfect staircase lure
bringing us up to a cloudless sky
of solid wall.
But what the heck,
as he leans against a statue,
this is modern almost art.
So they tick off all the soup cans,
and we see that they’ve discovered
all the chowder is Manhattan
from the fingerprints Manhattanstyle
they leave behind. And that solid black thing
that turns Mondrian
when you look hard enough for lines
is a busy world of signals now
that here they let you touch.
From Leavings