A Painting

I saw at a gallery and the people I met

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I went to a small gallery on a misty Friday night,
— the skirt of a hurricane mercifully
drifting back out to sea, dampened the whole city —

a cozy room where three
are enough to fill the room.
one girl with tied hair purple as eggplant,
one man wore a cowboy hat, and a tattoo
of a bare-breasted girl on his shoulder,
and another man or a woman, I wasn’t sure,
wore a three-piece suit,
stiff and starched,
with a tie that twisted pink and black,
and they gathered around a painting.

She wasn’t Mona Lisa.
She won’t make it to an art history book,
or even stay on the wall beyond a month.

There is something plain, something off hue,
something flawed and lost and perfectly still,
like a boat on a doldrum, about her gaze,
and the three strangers,
are chatting casually
about her affections
as if they were in a living room
all were familiar with.