Painting by Alice Neel
Once in childhood, I saw love in an art book.
Painting of Geoffrey Hendricks and Brian.
But, of course, I couldn’t read then
and thought them Bert and Ernie
in their more human form.
They looked older, more worn,
the flesh all wrong somehow,
pink and blotchy, the chest hair frighteningly real,
like this was too intimate a look
at characters on television. Indeed,
the resemblance is there: an apple-shaped
man with his banana-shaped man.
Even in the bowl are the repeating shapes,
one long with his round, cradled
and sheltering all the way down.
Brian Buczak—Ernie—was an artist too.
He transformed his and Geoffrey’s apartment
in New York City, painted over tiles,
installed functional plumbing,
made beauty out of scraps. He and Geoffrey
slept in a tent in their living room, for warmth,
cradled together, recursive housing structure,
until Brian went into a smaller box, velvet-lined, when
he died of AIDS.
Bert and Ernie, meanwhile, are doing well,
year after year on Sesame Street.
Their apartment is just as artful,
bulky furniture, bowls of fruit.
Ernie Bert’s source of all consternation,
chaos, and joy. Quite by accident,
I was right; what is tender and feral will make
itself known. Love is love is love
and looks like it—
whether in oils or velvet.
Nadia Arioli is the cofounder and editor in chief of Thimble Literary Magazine. Arioli’s poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net three times and for the Pushcart Prize and can be found in Cider Press Review, Rust + Moth, McNeese Review, Penn Review, Mom Egg, and elsewhere. Essays have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize and can be found in Hunger Mountain, Heavy Feather Review, SOFTBLOW, and elsewhere. Artwork has also been nominated for Best of the Net and has appeared in Permafrost, Kissing Dynamite, Meat for Tea, Pithead Chapel, Rogue Agent, and Poetry Northwest. Arioli’s forthcoming collections are with Dancing Girl Press and Fernwood Press.
Image: Alice Neel, Geoffrey Hendricks and Brian © Estate of Alice Neel
