Alice Going Into The Picture Elegy For Ilya Kabakov May 27 2023 Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

alice going into the picture he once said in an interview

how the installation should be, not only seem or into a series of rooms

and paintings, sad, little wistful stories in bloom

you with your own memories finding solace, the visitor

to the exhibit, happily confused, made to feel at home

otherwise neither

here nor there, suddenly, here where an apartment astronaut

lodges no longer here to pay for repairs to the ceiling

wont the neighbors be upset at the man who never threw

anything away

or there when floating upwards with Emilia into a barely sketched in sky

a lightness beyond Light itself known to you suddenly, as your own

like the palms of your own hands

green varnish on the baseboards an angel or only the wings framed

as evidence of Heaven where we trust you are now

admitted by Michelangelo or Van Gogh or all the people whose

names I don't know.

thank you for leaving so many things behind otherwise we wouldn't have known

would not have found at the great museums this expanded universe

the invisible shining, almost revealed floor to staircase going to the clouds attached

of art and story and wild illumination

surely the angels will inhabit now.

where else would they go?

mary angela douglas 28 may 2023