The room was like a mosh pit, smelling of
sweat and the vomit of small children, with
bodies packed in as on a subway train.
The image behind its bulletproof glass
was mostly ignored, flanked on either side

by guards who looked uneasy, as if they
had been hired instead to protect the life
of Madonna or Lady Gaga, while
everyone held up an electronic
device, trying to take a selfie, not

the work of art but the image of it,
not the self transformed in reverie but
always asserting its equivalence,
proud and forlorn in time, defeating all
possible insight, and the soul twisting

idly in its socket, poor broken thing,
working just like the shoulders of a girl
who was mugging in front of a Giotto,
her arms and legs outstretched, off-balance and
windmilling, as a winged Christ bestows

the stigmata on St. Francis, this too
recorded, gone live, gone viral, beyond
recall, while across the gallery in
a two-storey-high Wedding at Cana,
a young woman who has dozed off at the

banquet table wakes in time to see Christ
turn water into wine, the beautiful
nonchalant emerges from her slumber,
according to the wall label, alive
for a moment in the cloud of her perishing.