Shedding The Overcoat

Was It About the Weight One Feels

I'm holding a book the History Of Art
To show an eager group of young artists a picture. They're ready to
interpret Van Gogh into their own still tempera sunflowers
On construction paper with Q-Tips.
I am thinking about both
My tuna sandwich and an upset tummy that arose again today before
This lesson dipping our toes in the cultural pool.
"To Meme or not To Meme." that is somewhat the question,
when the book shifted and a breast almost
Slipped into view from a page
Of another artist revealed.

There were a lot of breasts as it turned out, so I,
A first grade teacher lost in meme-ings,
I decided to count them,
There were round thighs and juicy limbs, succulent flesh
Rather all through this book of all of time image from cave to David
From fig leaf to Newton.
Quite the bouquet of desires seems to suspend the meadow of this guilted
Art, into the den of antiquity (get Groucho if you can)
Looking at my kids and thinking of how this would
Remove my career now to "picture walk" and cause gales of peeling laughter
The nudity so ridiculous to them in the new world workbook order,
I was wondering why all the naked ladies?

There was one, as I was hiding this behind my desk in an empty room at lunch
Dressed in her skin on an Arabian divan
So devine I suppose with a black choker around her neck
The look is clear, the reason for this painting , completely clear.
Painted in times supposedly more stilted and sutured than this time,
Far more devout and in commune with spirit
She sits like a porkchop on a plate.
I thought, I majored in this field?
My early life creating was to this end, a cutlet?

Once to my daughter I said of this observation of hers
that museums were great if you needed to look in everybodies clothes,
Giving her in reply what old people told and taught me
That old standby
"It is so beautiful, the female body."
I didn't believe it really, not particularly, not at all actually, and never think that,
at an exhibit like this.

I always think the same thing, well almost always,
What was the purpose of painting so much female flesh
What compelled this to the canvas?
What possible set of needs or concerns over rode all else
To make this the thing I'm having to hide in my lessons?
Is it my age or my lack of beauty that finds this
so utterly ridiculous that we are
Projecting onto these treasures from the past, these windows into
Those that came before us the skin that cannot be shown,
was not shown so that now
In a time of so much utter undressing we find
We cannot find art, looking backwards we look upon
The forbidden was and transgress
Our children with the inability to remove from them
The stigmas around these functions of being and expression such that
To see a two thousand year old nude, or one almost 80 descend
Is indeed for me a firing offense?

At that I laugh and put the book into the dumpster on my way home.
The Jansons can just come here and explain it to all of us.