Personal Day Out At The National Gallery Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

they tinted the public gardens (or their own)
with a Heavenly brush
those old painters you rush by in the museum

thinking you've already seen them
your mind on what's for lunch, what's going on

and you don't see the mystery of what they captured there
so far exceeds where you are going, anywhere
that, if you did, I know you would stand here too, transfixed

in a room filled with white radiance so long
admiring Monet's white cathedral and its opaline
qualities until the guard thinks you're going to

steal it and carry it out somehow in your pockets.
but I ride home on the bus so nondescript you think
if you think of me at all while you're holding court

in front of the Supreme Court or near one of those marbled
entities that made up what was never a city for human
habitation really but only the monumental and those

who serve them;

you don't know but I do through delicate presentiment
by afternoon the city will be covered in snow from tip to toe
all the monuments, snow making a second snow

on the permanently snowy
while I'm at home removing from the raincoat
pocket of my mind most carefully

lest they fall apart,

as though they were mine alone from so much gazing:
those surpassing
those snow blinding images

mary angela douglas 1 november 2015