By Linda Bamber

1. Cocktails with a Curator

Idle moment in the day
Cocktails with a Curator playing on my laptop
the Italian-inflected curator going through the idiotic ritual
of matching a cocktail to the featured painting but
urbanely
his dignity uninjured
(I love this guy!)

and I’m eating lunch, when
BOING!
something flashes on the screen.
Three men with rifles trudging home

very little to show for the morning’s outing
one measly rabbit
nine hungry dogs
village life. It’s Bruegel’s famous Hunters in the Snow
WHAM!

I keep using these caps in an attempt to express
the shock I felt
sandwich halfway to my mouth
stars coming out of my boinked brain

but Mr. Smoothie has moved on.
Up now is a portrait of Charles the First (Hunters’ first owner)
painted from below
so he’d look taller than he was.
Charles is all in silks

huge hat
hand on hip
elbow in the viewer’s face as if to say
fuck-you-I’m-King. In Hunters the figures all know

their own significance
as Charles the Short did not
or his very horse wouldn’t have had to be depicted bowing down to him
nostrils to the ground. For Bruegel

size is about perspective
not ego
the women stoking fire near an inn
smaller only because farther from the viewer
not less consequential.
Others bearing burdens down the hill
are smaller still

at the bottom on a greenish lake
a dozen skaters just
a few black brushstrokes each
but playing hockey
dancing
falling
rushing to the fallen one to help. Are you alright?
Are you alright? I’m fine
I’ve just had my head
mysteriously boinked

not chopped off like poor Charles’.
Who lived, says Smooth, in tumultuous times.

2. Not Dead

My basement is crammed with the past.
I don’t expect to lose my head betimes, like Charles,
but time’s a-wasting, so routinely I resolve to clear it out.
Suddenly

a photo of myself at six
stops me like a slap.
Behind me hangs a reproduction of . . .

Hunters in the Snow! The damn thing dwelt in my earliest home
wired my neurons
disappeared

so of course my head went wham when it came back!
Now here’s this little gap-toothed Linda
smiling to oblige
the photo’s edges crinkled
as if a pinking shears had cut it out. How many of me are there
back there / down here?

I feel a fleeting helpless obligation
to retrieve them all. Among the skaters
one
horizontal millimeter stroke of red reads as
some girl’s skirt.
Seconds ago she was holding hands with some fellow brushstrokes
now on their way to help the fallen friend. Will he disintegrate

without her
like my hasty, not-dead, brush-stroked life
dissolving as I go? Or (egregiously) find someone else?

No. This is Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow.
A fire is being stoked to roast a meal.
The hunters have come home.
No way this kid skates off with someone else.

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