The Interior of the Buurkerk at Utrecht

Upon learning of the common practice of adding figures and details to other people's paintings. (If someone should try this, however, today and think, perhaps, that this Titian needs another apple in the corner or another branch on that shrubbery, it is likely he or she would be taken down in a second, no matter how well his or her command of the subject...)


The Interior of the Buurkerk at Utrecht

This is the center of time
or maybe just
a
center.
Or maybe just

time

throwing ripples of paint and air
in front of our very eyes.
Frozen that it is we
hurry past it
as we always do.

Thousands of years apart
apes, really
found paintings of each other
in torchlit caves
after slaying the tigers and bears
at the entrance.

And they take their torches and continue
what others have started
thousands of years ago
scratching buffalos next to antilopes
long extinct.

We don't slay tigers
nor bears
to get to see these. We
get to see these
for free

and so we hurry past
the mortal sights
created hundreds of years ago
by apes, really
some hundred years apart.

We're apes,
really.