What We Exhibit, by Mary K. Lindberg

Virgin and Child with Five Angels, by Sandro Botticelli (Italy) 1470

What We Exhibit

Why do patches of paint, glaze challenge us?
The individuals depicted aren’t alive 
until we gaze at them.

Do they puzzle about us as much as
we ponder their colours, paint, lines,
meaning — sometimes even their frame?

What might they reflect on as they inspect
our veneer  — would they trust our smiles or 
be skeptical, the way we suspect their wiles?   

Would they try to see what’s beyond our steady gaze, 
when we linger before them, edge up close, 
peer at their pearly oils?

In our time-woven skin they might sense a parade 
of disappointments, or wounds from a heart 
broken by absence, remorse, or worse.  

They want us to gape until we think we sense
what they will never reveal. We too mask secrets behind
open eyes, make ourselves a work of art every day.

At the end of our show, stripped of luminous sheath,
we disintegrate. Artworks remain, cracked or faded,
their magnetic eyes full of our afterglow.

Mary K. Lindberg

Dr. Mary Lindberg’s work explores links between art, music, dance, literature. Her chapbook, The Tang of Glue, appeared in 2006 (Puddinghouse); prize-winning poems in Beloit Poetry Journal, Gallery&Studio, among others; several ekphrastic poems in River of Stars (Artists Embassy International, 2022) She contributes often to Waterways. Winner of the Grand Prize, Dancing Poetry Contest (2021). Her nonfiction essays consider 9/11 (PEN award), and William Hogarth’s art and the London theatre. For an NYU English doctorate, she studied at Oxford; and, earlier, Eastman Music School. She was a tenured Associate Professor, California State U., Northridge, and UCLA Mellon Fellow.

Minerva (Pallas) and the Centaur, by Sandro Botticelli (Italy) 1482-83