after Rembrandt's Self-Portrait, Age 23, 1629
In the Dutch Room, everything was sacred.
To the eyes of the twenty-three-year-old,
even the place he called home for over
a century looks foreign. His gaze once
so full of life and ambition today
a hopeless mixture of relief and guilt.
He cannot say for sure what he saw, just
that he stared blindly in silence as they
tore him down, leaned his skin against a chest
facing the wall. He could sense the hitmen
passing for what seemed like hours, his best friends
taken out one by one. He finds it hard
to breathe. He’s thinking of the hostages,
their naked frames. Perhaps they are long gone.
He cannot speak about the beauty lost.
He still hears shattered glass, the rapid fire
of a dot matrix printer hammering
in the distance, his expression frozen,
his blood cold like the noise of the world, saved
only by carelessness, his portrait's false
backing, almost like a child playing dead.
NOTE: On March 18, 1990, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston was subject to
perhaps the most notorious art robbery in history. The Rembrandt self-portrait was taken down,
set aside, and mistakenly left behind by the thieves.