A Seventeen Dollar Glass of Wine and the Early Works of Matisse
I’m drinking overpriced wine
in the cafe at the Museum
of Modern Art on a Tuesday
afternoon.
Summer is done and the tourists
have gone back to whatever sad places
spawned them.
Everything is quiet and civilized
as I sip the Chardonnay of the day
while reading about Baudelaire
and his miserable genius.
The women are pretty
in skirts and dresses
whispering to each other
as they gaze upon some lesser
work of Edvard Munch.
Everything is clean, white and pristine
while outside are all the things
the headlines drone on about:
cancer and freeway crashes
things on fire and the inevitable
collapse of every decent
thing we’ve ever known.
But it all seems so far away
and meaningless when
compared to what Matisse
achieved in his later years
and it feels pointless
to dwell upon such dreariness
when confronted with Warhol’s
comic book yellows
and reds.
Here the mistakes of our past
have been captured and neutralized
handsomely framed and placed
upon the walls with gilded
plaques of explanation
so that we might see
and soberly contemplate
for a moment or two
before moving on
to something else
and then back downstairs
for another glass of wine
before everything
closes.
About the Author: William Taylor Jr. lives and writes in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, and a volume of fiction. His work has been published widely in journals across the globe, including Rattle, The New York Quarterly, and The Chiron Review. He is a five time Pushcart Prize nominee and was a recipient of the 2013 Kathy Acker Award. Pretty Words to Say, a new collection of poetry, is forthcoming from Six Ft. Swells Press.
Image Credit: “Henri Matisse Working on a Paper Cut Out” Creative Commons Public Domain
As It Ought To Be 
