Talking about Art at the Guggenheim in Bilbao
How profound, the air and the angel,
black and white, abstract,
but honestly all I can think about
is how, at eighteen,
I dated a guy rumored to be
Jackson Pollock’s illegitimate son,
his East River apartment,
red lights out the window,
Pepsi-Cola sign reflected
in dimpled night water,
floor to ceiling Pollocks on the walls,
how cocaine was involved,
all this I want to tell my wife,
awed by a masterpiece of thrown paint,
dots and random squirted lines,
as I respect the contemplative silence—
but as we enter a Warhol room, I lose it,
blurting out how I once had the same surgeon
as Andy Warhol, same operation,
same hospital, same floor,
same month in 1987, how he died,
and I didn’t,
saying my few minutes of proximal fame,
lost in contemplating my reflection,
wavering over Marilyn’s face.
Laura Foley is the author, most recently, of the poetry collections: Sledding the Valley of the Shadow, and Ice Cream for Lunch. She has won a Narrative Magazine Poetry Prize, The Common Good Books Poetry Prize, The Milton Kessler Poetry Prize, The Poetry Box Editor’s Choice Award, and others. Her work has been widely published in such journals as Alaska Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, American Life in Poetry, and included in numerous anthologies such as How to Love the World and Poetry of Presence. She holds graduate degrees in Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and lives with her wife on the steep banks of the Connecticut River, in New Hampshire.