Benjamin Goluboff
Art Appreciation
Art Institute closes at five and it’s four-fifty now.
In the Rubloff gallery the light is blue and oblique.
A double twilight is here as the spent light of day’s end
meets the great Chagall windows.
The room is dim and still and all but empty,
but the windows pulse and glow.
The windows, in serene chromatics,
say America.
Not the land that waits outside these walls,
but an America that never was,
a land where even gravity
is no object.
On silent feet the girl in the leotard
enters the gallery.
She is just passing through.
For her this is an interlude
between stories, between the waltz and the reel,
the verse and the chorus.
She pauses, a sylph in the dim room,
sees the guard is looking elsewhere,
steps up and plants, yes, a kiss
on the windows’ blue heart.
And then, her vote cast, she is gone.
Benjamin Goluboff, a small-time academic, teaches English at Lake Forest College. Aside from a modest list of scholarly publications, he has placed imaginative work in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Dead Flowers, Cabinet, Misfit, Anobium, Ascent, and elsewhere.