The Museum Bench

The bench waits
in the Saint Louis Art Museum,

brown leather
stitched into broad squares,

creased by coats and palms,
its low frame
square to the wall.

A woman sits first.

Across from her,
a field of yellow wheat
leans beneath a green sky.

She looks at it
until she is eight again,

standing beside her father
while grasshoppers strike
the cuffs of his faded blue jeans.

A boy hops and then runs in
dragging one shoelace.

He climbs beside her
and points at the clouds.

That one looks angry.

His mother reads the plaque
and tells him the painter
died in 1890.

The boy tilts his head to the right.

He was angry that he died?

At the other end,
a man removes his glasses

and polishes them
with the corner of his white shirt.

He tells me he has come 
for the renaissance,
That's three rooms away,
I say

but he stops here.

The woman beside him
is wearing a red blouse and a black skirt
and a perfume
that I remember.

He must remember it too.

He steps toward her.

Neither of them speaks.

Their sleeves touch once
when they lean forward—
red and white
and so pink.

Across the room,
a man takes a picture 
with his phone.

The painter’s thumbprint is here!

His voice echoes 
around the room,
and I try to remember
the last time I was that excited

about anything.

The guard walks past
with his hands behind his back.

Another bench 
holds a couple in silence—
the kind of silence
that twirls her hair
and swings his ankle,

two men whisper in the corner,

a question about God,

half an argument,

and a truce
after one of them says,

My wife loved this one.

After a respectable time,
everyone rises
like popcorn—
not like a wave. 

The paintings remain stoic
or maybe they sigh
inside their frames.

Once you're created
in paint
must you always be 
be performing?

The bench where I sat
seems to linger on the image
I left—

of a woman who has heard
and seen
and carried
and forgiven
a million stories
but has no one to tell.

—Iris Lennox