Perception has seized the world.
They go through the urban Saturday,
cognitive, intuitive,
she the delineator, he the spectator,
asking a stranger™s, a lover™s questions
of the gargoyles, the dioramas,
the lost causes, the restless probabilities,

naming the manikins, the predicaments,
the dark fables, the human entreaties.

---

At the entrance to the art museum
they pause, smiling,
back out, step in again.

---

They know the galleries that are most alert,
most gazing, listening,
where their affinities are most affirmed

by symmetries of intuition,

by exclamations of a place, a time,
a sensibility,

by the ardors of Goya, Rembrant, Chagall,
their disclosures of how they consented,
Tintoretto and Klee and Hopper,
to be men.

---

Absolved, resolute
they exit into the afternoon,
into all actuality,
all hues and contours,
all circumstantiality of frizzled hair,
headless trout,
spires of Saint Nicholas,

the very substance, they are saying,
awed, exhilarated,
the very substance of that alteridea,
art, they are saying,
that enigma of the choosing faculties,
that discernment of a human weight
in the nuances of what is,

the light turning bronze, they are saying,

the catastrophe on the news rack,

a flurry of starlings.