May Swenson – Dec 19, Fun with Chairs

Everywhere in New York City feels like a front row seat to the “greatest show on earth”.

AT THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

At the Museum of Modern Art you can sit in the lobby

on the foam-rubber couch; you can rest and smoke,

and view whatever the revolving doors express.

You don't have to go into the galleries at all.

In this arena the exhibits are free and have all

the surprises of art—besides something extra:

sensory restlessness, the play of alternation,

expectation in an incessant spray

thrown from heads, hands, the tendons of ankles.

The shifts and strollings of feet

engender compositions on the shining tiles,

and glide together and pose gambits,

gestures of design, that scatter, rearrange,

trickle into lines, and turn clicking through a wicket

into rooms where caged colors blotch the walls.

You don't have to go to the movie downstairs

to sit on red plush in the snow and fog

of old-fashioned silence. You can see contemporary

Garbos and Chaplins go by right here.

And there's a mesmeric experimental film

constantly reflected on the wide

steel-plate pillar opposite the crenellated window.

Non-objective taxis surging west, on Fifty-third,

liquefy in slippery yellows, dusky crimsons,

pearly mauves—an accelerated sunset, a roiled

surf, or cloud-curls undulating—their tubular ribbons

elongations of the coils of light itself

(engine of color) and motion (motor of form).