To the right, Gothic sandstone cloistral tendrils push the sky upward.
Is it the same movement?
In front, de Kooning's woman-form pushes the paint with
separate sovereignty of canvas.
Dabs of blue and yellow hold tension against Georgia O'Keeffe's female cosmos.
Their texture a protuberance in glistening 3-dimensionality.
Facing the canvas sky, I try to analyze its reverse impression.
What sovereignty of form pushes the sky above Frankfurt?
In a dark room, the four winds proffer movies in the Museum für Moderne Kunst.
Bill Viola - sensual inundation with simultaneous cognizant movement.
Freeze frame - hear capillaries flutter and feel the movement as
earthworms tickle dark roots in a grassy field.
I practice absorbing the input with more than five senses
(combinations and permutations)
in anticipation of the real-world.
On the way to Deutsches Filmmuseum is Schweizer Strasse - another
well-executed, punctiliously-ended festival with
whirling traffic and grinding street cleaners.
Lugubrious, polychromatic objects glow from shop windows where
outside, well-groomed, pedigreed people walk.
Stop.
Slowly fermented äpfelwein poured from ceramic jars.
In portraits, shine flat smiling faces without emotion.
I look around and recognize the expressions of America.
Flitting from scene to scene, I identify the familiar -
here a gas station,
there 8 tablespoons equals ¼ cup.
Vapid statements of a vapid existence.
Do my poems explain who I am?
In the bathroom, I am shocked to see in the mirror my own face
rendered flat and trivial by unknown forces.
Christy Bergman,
April 1997