A Real Person

I am listening to Frankie Cosmos and thinking about Coneheads
and the time I went to the Guggenheim to see a curtain I dreamed about
it wasn’t there
like Aomame’s portal back to 1984 in Haruki Murakami’s big thick book
a book like a bible
it felt like a bible on the train

I wanted to see
Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (Golden) beaded curtain again

When I got to the Guggenheim they were exhibiting Italian Futurism
Futurism is interesting but all the edges and blurs bore me
Sorry FT, sorry cars

It says somewhere on the Guggenheim’s website that the curtain was
about membranes and AIDS and transitory passage
which I didn’t know when I first saw it in 2010
I was young then
I am young now but the curtain is not in New York anymore

in the dream I was just there
staring up at the curtain
which hung all the way from the cathedral ceiling of the room
at the top of the spiral of the Guggenheim
to the gallery pale wood floors
it was like a big gold beaded wall
it looked solid but I walked through it
I walked through it a lot of times, laughing
feeling the strands of it in my fingers
like hair feeling a love
like Eileen Myles wrote about
in Inferno
like the sun coming up
maybe that was sex but love in sex in art was how I was feeling

when the sun hit
some of the beads they looked like pinpricked white holes
rifts in time, like stars are
I laughed, I would have laughed again

the best art makes me laugh or cry or be quiet
art that makes me think thoughts that are kind of out there
seemingly untethered?

I talked to a plant in a wheel
barrow instead of seeing the curtain that wasn’t there at the Guggenheim
and I stood in front of a painting of the soul of a mountain thinking
mountains are lucky because their souls are not actually separate from the
earth’s soul
then I remembered all souls are not separate and I felt very happy