Gallery painting

“You don’t love her, you only love the frame you've trapped her inr”
was one of his favorite thoughts
love to him after all
Was walking aimlessly through an art gallery

Starting off patient and curious, taking his time
reading every letter of every placard, every date and contemporary
studying every brush stroke and finally,
annihilated by beautiful simplicity,
forgetting himself

But the annihilation was always short-lived
And the second climax, after the first, was no climax at all
Each canvas being of such an unattainable standard,
For how could they not be? Hanging there so composed and self-assured
How could you hang so without once being thought
worthy of preservation, of a golden frame
A true masterpiece

But like the prodigies that created them,
the manicured hands that waved down the
Trains to the sandstone art academy;
five-pronged tools of Providence
falling to Earth in order that the rest may taste
Ambrosia with their eyes
Will all inevitably discover on their arrival
so many others of their kind
So too could individual paintings when placed
side by side, arouse my sentiments
The way a building in lower manhattan might
Strike me as tall

And finally, with aching feet,
with blurred eyes and frantic
cursory glances he realised for the first and hundredth time
That each was beautiful in its own unique way
which was to say that all were in the same way
trite

And the rest of the gallery,
All the rooms he had not yet visited
Now only interested him
Because they were just that,
rooms he had not yet visited