to kiss you

To kiss you should not involve such fear of imprecision. I shouldn’t mind the gallery attendant. He is not looking, that’s not what his torch and lanyard is for. I have seen at least four people holding hands already and I’m only just out of the double doors. 

To kiss you should not feel like anything other than embellishment. They, people, loads of people, have kissed in the gallery precisely in solidarity with my freedom to kiss you. When that historian shot himself in Notre Dame ten years ago, when my grandfather told stories of his time serving in the army, he was not thinking of me lingering in this gallery gift shop, flicking postcards and deliberately not looking at you. 

I am not biding my time. A lion would not balk at kissing you.

The gallery attendant is not looking at us. I have spotted another couple kissing, a boy and a girl, like it was nothing, like they didn’t have to think about lions.

To kiss you would be plotless, and nothing like falling. The gallery attendant is not taking note of our wordless exchanges. In fact, he’s looking the other way.

The move was mine to make,

all gallery-hushed and happy as I reached for you    

but

out of the corner of my

secluded sight, my

all my resolution,

all is sudden right angles and

all at once

it’s children running past the bodega, voices breaking as they reach new highs, monochrome shapes aligned as teeth with the first taste of a scorching espresso, I stand here having steeled myself when every word was cursive and gentle but now I find all my letters strung out with rigid symmetry, bending, how could you frame such a thing, I mean a painting, or a print that has thumbed such a black hole into the wall just by being nailed there, I think of this everytime I enter a gallery, if you were wondering, but you’re not, you’re looking, not at me, not at the lion-couple, you are just clear-eyed and looking at a beyondness – I did not know  hand could hold hand but also not-hold hand like this, standing in a gallery, when looking at a painting so regular and simple, not-looking directly at you and not directly thinking how, then, when I move to take your shoulder and the attendant is quite so attendant and the painting is quite so unwatchable I cannot stand to be here, looking there, standing in front of a painting the surface of which is textured and abstract, seeing suddenly all the lines cross in such a pleasing way: looking at this painting over your shoulder and taking your hand is like the completion to all of my delusion, it’s all there in black and white, a capital letter first person I becoming a forward slash, an exclamation mark becoming a backstroke because I find I cannot kiss you standing by this painting, although I could imagine kissing you by other gentler, less queer paintings, by hazy Hammershøi’s windowpanes, by Sarah Lucas’ ‘Self Portrait with Fried Eggs’, always queuing-up the next opportunity rather than being up for it, there, in situ, mindlessly, I have gone too far to pull back, I could kiss you with severe black and white patchwork-quilts so why not here, with you wearing black and white gingham and me wearing my tattered Levi’s overalls, hair tied back with a ruby ribbon, I am squaring up, I am not holding you but holding onto you for fear of slipping, at the thought of you by this painting and my lips anywhere near yours, the gallery attendant and his lion eyes, to hold you here is a game of chess on a grumbling crumbling glacier, the gambit’s gone your way and I am bishop-fumbled rook-to-h8, I might as well be kissing you in a glistening stagelight, my hazel eyes shining in the warm glow, but it’s ‘not in a gallery, think of the children!’, it’s as strange as your hand in mine, my hand not quite in yours, but not yet quite out, the starting flag at the race track, a white flag meaning surrender, Black Flag meaning punk bands formed in Seventies California, I cannot tell whether you or I are leaning now nor if the attendant is approaching or I just think he is, nor if I am staggering into the falling and rolling of the painting, its rolling lines like tarmac heating through a drift of snow, in this second’s thought I could have, rather than grown anxious and aware of the attendant, this is absurd, this is all absurd, and that’s the power of it, the checking of my hand in your hand, I’m sure there are rules about this kind of thing on a noticeboard somewhere, that we can ignore, and others can misread, it’ll all be there in black and white, the empty page so daunting, the full page so disappointing, the pairing of us, the painting, behind your shoulder, through your hair, despite the gallery attendant leaning in, 

and all that I am, you have made italic. Holding you here is to make a checkered past. I will never be brave, and I cannot kiss you by this painting.

You have leaned in, and have kissed me without even thinking about it

it is the easiest thing in the world

and as you move onto the next painting the gallery attendant fiddles with his watch, the paintings settle onto the wall, and all in all you alleviate me, unexpectedly.