Wheat, 1957
When is someone
going to come
harvest the wheat
in this painting of
Agnes Martin’s?
There is a world-
wide shortage,
people are starving,
and here a whole field
hangs on the wall
of the San Fran-
cisco Museum
of Modern Art.
One would first have
to get a scythe
past the guards,
then somehow climb
into the painting
and, starting from
one end, start laying
swaths down so that
anyone sitting
where I sit now
would see the painting
slowly change,
like how the far
side of a lake
will ripple before you
feel the wind.
But then the big problem
as always with museums –
how to get it out.