Champagne, and: Cy Twombly Untitled

Champagne

I am buying eggs and tomatoes and lettuce and bleu cheese and North Carolina bacon and apricot juice and a chicken and two bottles of champagne and the cashier asks about them I tell her this wine's the original champagne that it was created by monks it tastes nice and dry the 86-year-old bagger whose birthday's Monday and who will not be celebrating he'll be going to get some cord wood from his sister in South Carolina starts to describe to the cashier how I'll drink the wine in a small glass I will pour it after smelling the cork I will stick out my pinky and take sips fancy and dainty he says he doesn't have wine in his house just MD 20/20 my mad dog days are over I say which prompts him to imagine my five houses and two cars and he's naming more things while wrapping the champagne in individual brown paper bags I walk away from his fantasy of my life I walk away he's either flirting with me or he hates me so often impossible to tell in the mountain's shadow

Cy Twombly Untitled

The wordless elegance of gesture, white lines on grey ground. The painting asks with radical politeness that we consider surface. So we do, standing in cool museum air, in the unerring illumination delivered by magisterial skylights. All day the painting reminding everyone of chalkboards, a rare universal artifact of what we call civilization. We query that idea too. Then perhaps we will have the fresh sole for lunch at that café we go to whenever we're in Rome. When we turn to leave, the painting performs last rites on our visit, offering a graffitied prayer, which we won't ever understand. We're too busy wondering how much the painting's worth. Later we'll over-tip the waiter because we're ashamed of our poor Italian.