Lemon Light, and: Bonnard at the Phillips

Lemon Light

Joseph Beuys, Capri-Batterie, 1985

In the Boston MFA there's a strange lemon
with a plug and light-bulb attached. It rests on its side,
so that the bulb's bulb and the lemon's bulb
form a cartoonish 'L' inside the glass museum cube.

At the time, we talked about what makes art and laughed
and now I'm angry with myself for only noticing
how the dimpled rind swelled around the metal,
the yellow-to-green-to-blue mold and crust crawling up

each prong into the black socket. Because,
as it turns out, there was a whole philosophy
inside that lemon. The acid working as a galvanic battery
that could bring to light a new world in 60 watt doses.

Inside that lemon, inside the delicate honeycomb
of the multitudes, was infinite translucent energy,
living in pulp, the cells holding force like spaces between
nerves of an insect's wing. Like a net for the acid's heat.

And warmth was what he wanted, lying there
in La Certosa, his lungs failing him and beauty
failing him. What can the body do but lose its charge,
as it rests in the sun, coming up with ways to make us smile.

Bonnard at the Phillips

This impish face, a child laughing,
a sound bouncing through the museum rooms,
rolls itself into a ball of string, red, chases
a black cat into the fireplace – it hasn't held
a fire for years now, but a girl lived here,
she sang and counted the one-inch tiles,
drew pictures in the soot – here, it hardly
matters that the black dog is brown, and anyway,
the cat hides, watching the red slither through
canvas and into the sun: the sun shines on a garden
in the south of France, and a nanny follows
the boy playing with his stick and hoop spinning,
spinning into the yellow wheel of an omnibus,
this time in winter, behind a woman who walks
the streets of Paris against the wind, her scarf
lonely and high in the air, held high in the air
like the smooth black leg of a dancer's stocking,
a poster, it would have been everywhere
bending against the blue – a calm shadow, lamp
shade, filling the brown table beneath, just
the simple brown and a dish of cherries, each
red globe with a swirl of blue at the center,
a sound, like a cry or sometimes like laughter.