Michael Bazzett

TWO ROOMS

Each room holds the same framed picture. There is a slowly moving queue of people that trails from each room out into the street as they wait to step into the cool hush of the interior. Upon entering, they will stand at a velvet rope and gaze at the woman in the painting; she has the face of a barn owl, a halved apple, a medieval saint calmly staring even as tears track her pale cheeks. The tears leave silvery trails like those of slugs on leaves. 

In the first room, people enter with moist bills clutched in their worn hands. They hope to wedge the money into the crevices in the crumbling brick around the painting. They do this so the woman in the picture will mend their bones and end their hungering and give voice to the longings tucked in the corners of their lives. If they could leap the velvet rope and lick the tears from her cheeks they would. 

In the other room, the viewers hand crisp bills to a solicitous man with designer eyeglasses who hands them a small metal lapel-clip in exchange, and they then wander toward the woman in the painting, exclaiming with pained delight that one cannot possibly discern whether it is joy or despair that wells those tears. Yet if they could leap the velvet rope and lick her cheeks they would. 

And they can. After all it is only stuffed red velvet, fastened to a brass stand with a spring-clip that even a child could work. 

So here they are, avidly licking the benevolent image of her face, assiduous as dogs come to comfort their mistress in a time of great trouble, or even greater happiness (for it is one quirk of tears that they are as readily coaxed by sadness as joy). 

Now, here is our question: If you could tell us which chamber contains art and which contains religion, we would be most grateful. 

We clandestinely documented these proceedings when we visited each site, and the resulting film has become one of our most enduring comedies — the theater lines that spill out into the street and snake around the block — yet we are unsure if we are laughing at the right moments. We have our theories, of course. Yet even our most highly trained observers continue to squabble, sometimes even resorting to personal remarks. 

One scholar has even proposed that you refuse to make a distinction between art and religion. Yet your wars would suggest otherwise. In any case, our favorite part is the woman on crutches who waits all day to slip a few coins into a crevice above a guttering candle beneath the painting. When she lets her crutches topple to the floor and begins to dance, we have never laughed so hard.

Michael Bazzett is a poet and teacher. He is the author of five full-length poetry collections, two chapbooks, and two books of poetry in translation. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, West Branch, Guernica, Copper Nickel, The Sun, Tin House, and 32 Poems, among others. Visit him at michaelbazzett.com.