Poetry
Table Turning
She sat her purse down on the kidney-shaped coffee table,
turned on the floor-lamp, and called
the monkey over to have a chat.
What had he done
today? She wanted to know.
He had climbed the palm tree,
he said. She knew this wasn’t true
but didn’t press the point.
Late night he would—arm around her neck—admit
he had trampled the snow drops.
He had chewed on his tail.
He had mindlessly complied pictures of flamingoes
cut from magazine pages
and fashioned them into an enormous collage.
He had had it framed.
He had taken slides.
He had submitted them for review at an upstart gallery.
The curve of his tail made an S-shape
as he slid from the sofa.
Sulking now he said, See
what you’ve done?
And she did see. And together they sobbed.
Sigmar Polke, Illus. 3, Essay: "Early Influences, Later Consequences or: How Did the Mokeys Get into My Work? and other icono-biograhical questions" (trans. from the German by John S. Southard)
Contributor
Mary Jo BangMARY JO BANG is the author of seven collections of poems. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Terry Winters: Table of Contents
By David RhodesJUNE 2021 | ArtSeen
Terry Winters’s current exhibition at Matthew Marks features paintings that derive their compositions from sources that range from the molecular to the cosmic, from the natural world to propositional math equations and the virtual world generated by computers.
Live from New York
By Charles AubinOCT 2021 | Critics Page
Performance today in no way escapes this contemporary condition of customized reality; it exists in a constant state of arbitration between live experience and documentation. Through phone video recording and ricochets of likes and shares, performance no longer stands fully apart from our endless deluge of social media.
Suffocation of the Young: A Report from Brooklyn on Schooling, Childhood and Mental Illness Today
By Juan ChabrierMAR 2019 | Field Notes
At some point during the workday, you may have considered that your role in creating a product or service somehow plays an important part in sustaining the world we live in, even if that world leaves much to be desired.
The Expanded Moment of Being
By Farzia FallahSEPT 2021 | Critics Page
The choral piece Miserere by the Italian composer Gregorio Allegri (1582, Rome–1652, Rome) is assumed to have been written in the 1630s and was regularly performed in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. It is a work for nine voices, divided between two choirs. The piece consists of six sections, which are basically repetitions, in each of which a different line of Psalm 51 is sung. Today, when I listen to this piece outside any religious context, I feel as if the piece could go on and on. Listening to it, there is no difference for me, for instance, between minute three and minute eight. I am in a state of supreme concentration during these 12 minutes or so, with no sense of now or later or before. The piece creates its own time, and in these repetitions, one loses the sense of time. It has the effect of a piercing Now.
