Penguins at the Art Museum, by Katie Manning

Young Man in a Black Beret, by Rembrandt van Rijn (Netherlands) c. 1622

Penguins at the Art Museum
 
On May 6, 2020, Humboldt penguins from the Kansas City Zoo 
visited the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
 
The people have to stay home 
to keep a virus from spreading,
so Peruvian penguins have come 
instead. The museum director 
conducts their tour in Spanish 
as they explore. He thought 
they’d love Monet’s Water Lilies,
that they’d feel calmed by the cool 
colors, but no. They wander by, 
preferring the warm red walls 
of the Baroque room, the slash-
-and-brood poses of Caravaggio, 
the familiarity of human forms.
 
I hope the penguins saw 
my favourite piece, Young Man 
in a Black Beret. Rembrandt 
turned the brush around, scraped 
its pointed end through thick paint 
to get those textured swirls in curly 
hair. I’ve seen how light catches 
a curl’s curve to the left of his lips, 
but I never noticed how his lips 
also curl, as if he’s slightly amused, 
as if he’s just been told, but can’t 
believe, that in three and a half
centuries, penguins from Peru
will waddle through a gallery 
across the globe and see 
his still-young face.

Katie Manning
​
Katie Manning is the founding editor-in-chief of Whale Road Review and a professor of writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. She is the author of Tasty Other, which won the 2016 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award, and her fifth chapbook, 28,065 Nights, is newly available from River Glass Books. www.katiemanningpoet.com.