was a successful dealer,
and his Christmas party, too, was a success:
we all knew it, for weren't we all there?
And the successful artist
being handled in her eighth decade knew it
too, although she was so old and had been so
unsuccessful for so long
that she seemed to pay no mind to anyone.
She sat quite still, her rosy scalp glistening
through her rather thin white hair,
and gave no sign of hearing, or ignoring,
any of our successful conversations.
Above the chair she sat in
(like a furnished bone) loomed the decorative
focus of the long room which had been handled
by a successful designer
of skeletal interiors: a Roman male,
oversize and barely under overweight,
every muscle equally
successful—classically nude but not
And as the talk continued
Alice Neel leaned back and looked up into
the forking limbs above her head, a pure
pelvic arch indeed denuded
of the usual embellishment, so that
all that met her eye was a shadowed empty
socket, the mere embouchure
where once unstinting paraphernalia
must have lodged. "Very fragile things, penises,"
she mused, and for a moment
no one there succeeded in saying a word.
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