Let’s Try This Again: Time's Avenue

After a 3-year hiatus due to, you know, life and death and stuff, Dragon’s Meow is back! Making time for art, writing, and contemplation never ceases to be a challenge — but I have a hopeful feeling about the coming months, friends.

This post is about an artist’s date I took with my friends Lauren Kindle and her daughter in Manhattan last December. Lauren’s a big Chagall fan, so we started out by visiting Chagall, Lissitzky, Malevich: The Russian Avant-Garde in Vitebsk, 1918-1922 at the Jewish Museum. Then we walked down 5th Avenue and decided to visit the Guggenheim, too, because a friend of Lauren’s had heartily recommended Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future. The show was amazing! Transcendent, even.

Seeing the two shows in the order we did felt like walking through a story of unfolding consciousness. That’s what this poem is about.

Time’s Avenue

In the beginning were the lovers,
drinking wine and dancing in the village.
The houses — upside down and sideways.
The goats — in the air, everywhere.
Next, the idealists moved in.
Angular and colorless, they edged out
the old master’s dream-creations.
Finally, the realist unspooled her mind.
Her thoughts were multicolored,
geometric yet generous, so we could travel
through space and spiral into ourselves,
then out again into a library of voices.


Here are some pictures of the art and architecture that inspired the poem.

“the lovers, / drinking wine and dancing”

Marc Chagall, Double Portrait with Wine Glass, 1917-18

“Her thoughts were multicolored…”

Admiring The Ten Largest by Hilma af Klint

“we could travel / through space and spiral into ourselves”

The “library of voices”

The Aye Simon Reading Room