Munich Glyptothek, Boy with a Goose
views through balistraria arrow loop loopholes arrowslit the way ruins fall what stands aqueducts abbeys convents theatres the pattern on ceramics etched painted mosaic floors tilework on walls ceilings inside out the appearance of bulls hands fragments of soldier a foot a pierced torso a thousand steps to a monastery top built on rock and fossil strewn across each striation the way tulips stripe yellow orange pink field against field at a thousand feet
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as always the hands just want to scribble get color down on white surfaces in batches of texture in smear and leaf and stubble the feet want to run circles around substrates while color blooms like bombs across a ranch house wall and they did they danced they kicked they leapt always in opposite directions at odds against themselves one in search of facts to share to soar the other story myth the gods when the gods handed you color they must’ve laughed knowing how little use you’d make of it that’s how it is with gods always giving doubled-edged gifts
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rewinding the reel of childhood and absence i don’t think my therapist understands when i tell her i belong to feel belonging in museums in art what’s that about minimal interaction socially i acknowledge exactly she says objects you can control not people which is when i object art opens worlds it’s a portal a time machine a zoomroom connected to people history culture belief politics economics one piece to another lineage of artists makers circumstance i wanted to live in a museum some of my closest relationships to art that’s not a choice a plan a decision some crushes over in a flash some last and last
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you say it’s not worth it we don’t have that kind of money and never will i say i want a roman villa with a glass curtain wall i say maybe just a folding glass panel i say i want the outdoors indoors i don’t want to choose between history and the present if i can’t live in a museum i want to live in a heated ruin with a glass ceiling with a panoramic view of eternity of everlasting of undeceiving multiplicity and the non-anthropocentric there will be water there will be bees
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in the room with a boy with a goose having chased brueghel to munich and the memory of a room of his paintings overwhelming to some 20-something girl who’d seen nothing their street scenes their people their crowds making space for the girl to find herself to feel some sense of belong in the world in art the boy with the goose a page a poem not yet created maybe the boy grows up becomes a soldier but for now he struggles wrestling to contain a goose bigger than himself and always will be i chase the goose to munich take in the fragments of legs arms torsos heads take pictures of some dying trojan pulling an arrow from his chest a dying boy eirene the goddess of peace they put all this stuff in monasteries during the bombing that began in 1944 rebuilt the museums slowly this one reopening in 1972 a decade before i saw it the first time the alte reopened a couple of years before i went there the brueghels i remember not here at all and never were
Wendy Vardaman (wendyvardaman.com), PhD, works as a web and digital media specialist. Her creative practice includes editing, prose writing, printing, book arts, and staring out windows. After a long detour through art and design, she came out of the maze with the bits and pieces assembled in two new chapbooks, thread me an exit (Brain Mill Press 2025) and the other end of the line (dancing girl press 2026). She volunteers as a graphic designer for poetry-related causes.