Transcript

I’m Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

In the middle of the day, my friend Jeremy and I shared a joint then went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. We were young and seeking fun. Our friend Jennifer met us there. We gave ourselves the assignment of guessing the names of visual art, only looking at the wall signage after making our guess. We stood close, then moved back, then inched closer again, studying every inch of a canvas with great seriousness — then, bursting out a title, like it was a great game no one had ever thought of before.

In front of Cezanne’s The Large Bathers, Jeremy shouted The Nude Beach at Sundown. By Picasso’s The Three Musicians, I said, The Clown Sits In and Plays Bluegrass. We roared in delight and were shushed by several attendants. I became self-conscious, aware other museum goers were agitated by our boisterous laughter. But we kept at it, going from room to room.

But then, we found our play silenced, by powerful works that demanded our attention, conceptual works that elicited our stillness. I remember how Brancusi’s Bird in Space, abstracted to a single gesture of flight, blew our minds. We heard on the surface of a canvas, the noisy and chaotic music of Duchamp’s mechanical painting Nude Descending a Staircase. We were coaxed into the quiet and serenity of the museum.

Today’s lyric poem walks us through a villa garden painted on a fresco. Reading the poem, it is as though we eavesdrop on the speaker’s awe, but also how a rich, imagined replica of fruit, birds, trees leads us to thoughts about our own relationship to natural spaces.

At the Museum of Empress Livia’s Garden Room
by Pimone Triplett

In a future we believe in, these plants
will all be ghosts. In the Rome
that likes to be a mirror, you can see 
the way a single shrub, once
quick-set to seal the emerald shade
to a spiky evergreen shape
on the thousand-year-old-fresco,
is all smudge and distant cousin now
to its own far forward arboreal bogey.
In the ancient room you can walk
right into eons of oscillating blurs,
bend down close for leftover pigment
drippings, alembics of a laurel self.
The nouns pile up. Umbrella pine,
oleander, quince. Or go missing
as anything else because we think
so, thought so even in this painted 
garden where an emperor’s wife 
came for the quiet scheming held 
essential for her well-preserved 
world to go. If you squint, the eggshell
poppy comes clear. 
The planned erasures of boxwood
or cypress say how much 
an underground passion for ruins
first requires the building
of a city above. You hope the copy
in the gift shop captures the delicate
crawl of chamomile that fades 
left of center like a garden overlaid
with the idea of garden, ongoing.
Come to your senses. The guard 
in the hallway has a bad cough.
The only bird in a cage
is near the exit. The rest are free.

“At the Museum of Empress Livia’s Garden Room” by Pimone Triplett. Used by permission of the poet.