–after Tullio’s Adam at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
When I write a sentence I try to put you back together.
Tullio’s Adam smashed into 28 large pieces and hundreds of small pieces.
Here’s a sentence.
I don’t know how many pieces of you there were.
My horoscope says you don’t get to have everything or everyone you want.
That a lifetime of wanting is less poetic than you thought.
That’s not a complete sentence according to Word.
It took 10 years to fix Tullio’s Adam.
There are fault lines across bicep, thigh, knee, ankle, shin, neck.
Areas of loss were filled in.
If I brush the bangs off your forehead there’s the scar where your scalp was stitched.
You are an assemblage.
A sentence is an imagined masterpiece writes Gertrude Stein.
I am trying to figure out the difference between a sentence and a picture.
Between you and Adam.
The more sentences I write does not necessarily mean the more you are saved.
You and Tullio’s Adam are the same height.
I imagine the magnum opus of you.
Let him/her go says the horoscope.
In the end three fiberglass pins were used to put together Tullio’s Adam.
Think in willows says Gertrude Stein.
So I see you
As you never were.
from Poetry Northwest 12.2 Winter & Spring 2018More by Pamela Hart from the library
Copyright © Pamela Hart
Used with the permission of the author
on behalf of Poetry Northwest.