Looking, just the idea of it, sounds like a continuous moment or action. An ocean. A fan in July. Planets planeting. But looking isn’t even episodic, let alone a stream or line. When I look, I am assembling moving boxes. I am never going to pack. I am away. I am reaching for. I am just reaching for my phone. I’m a row of anything I can’t line up. I look like the opposite of stone. I am inside something that is running away from me.

The word mothering sounds like I am always looking at whom I am mothering. An expected rain. A wasteful shower. Making sure the cups are full. Filling to spill. The word mothering sounds like Mary’s painted, downward smile. Her always look that we can only discuss as subtle differences, never unexpected, in the permanent collections.

I was in the room. I am in the room. Looking at art. My big foot up to the line. My absence. A description. A description of my description. My wonder. My embarrassment when I take photos of the art. The moment when I don’t care who’s here. Talking until someone is present. Saying come over here, knowing you can’t.

My baby looked like a baby. I was scared of her. Not my baby, just like any red screaming baby, when they put her in my arms. When we took her home, we three were very alone. We kept everyone away for weeks and weeks. Her first outing was the art museum. Her head turned to light in the atrium. The museum was empty, but I still sweat. There are art museums without guards, if you live in the wrong towns. Well that’s your choice, they said.

We stand round blankly as walls.

In the museum, I’m not the best student. I look and take notes like a staircase. I have as many feelings as an umbrella that can’t be opened. Especially in a museum. I think you’ll like this if you are not the best student, either, and want to connect. Here is a box. What does here mean? If you are not a student, you are probably a good student. This painting is actually more sculpture, I read.

I stayed long enough to learn about hands. See how Margaret Kilgallen’s work, they said, looks like a commercial sign, manufactured. But when you come close, you can see the waver, the hand.

We don’t like a waver if we don’t want it there. We like it when we don’t expect it. When it doesn’t disappoint, and we didn’t think it could have. When we are already looking. Not in love, but something a little better than that. Just looking. When you are in love a waver doesn’t seem good. Unless you are more than in love, then it’s a wag. If you are talking about love, you are just annoying whomever you are talking to.

Heather wrote that she was most surprised by a new presence. Once there wasn’t anyone, and then there was someone. I thought about what this would be like. I waited in that way that’s just living, like being pregnant. I was pregnant. Looking at Heather’s Facebook posts on what it’s like to be a new parent that I just liked and waited to come true.

New statue.

Looking while mothering sounds like you are kidding yourself. Sounds like you are a bad mother. Sounds like you aren’t doing anything except seeing food on faces and leaving the show with no memory.

Everything now as rückenfigur.

Someone is the artist, someone is the art, someone is the writer, someone is the poem, someone is the reader, someone is the listener, someone is taking pictures, someone is guarding, someone is cataloguing. Someone drapes a blanket over all of us. It’s Viola. She is making a tent.

Who is here? My neighbor is playing his oboe next door. It doesn’t sound like a baby crying, like I read once in a story. Something must exist that just wants to be near it.

Carrying sounds invisible. In the museum we read that Do Ho Suh’s installation, “New York City Apartment, Apartment A, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA,” measured the dimensions to his old New York basement apartment and recreated it in silk. Measuring is displacement but sounds like mending.

An artist tells me when he read to his child, every time he turned a page his son was learning about time. I read to Viola for almost two years before I realize I never really get to look at the pictures.

I just want to be near the art. I can’t really look, because Viola is two. I’m here to be near something. I don’t know if I want to know what that is. I can’t stop the stroller for long or she will scream. She’d rather walk herself. Desire seems like a very clear idea—you want this person, this object, this place. I’m happy to be near something that should be given more time. I don’t think anything comes after this.

Watching a baler baling hay is not like looking at art. But it was what I saw. Perfectly packed rectangles in rows, waiting to be picked up. And rows of corn and beans. Years and years of rows. We walked beans, which means we walked down the rows of soybeans looking for weeds to pull. Helping dad’s crop yield more crop. This part wants to come into the poem not like a weed.

If I ever get an artwork to speak, I hope it just lets its cold teeth chatter.

We react yes or no to the art within a few seconds of being in front of it, like we do toward a person. Whatever sprouted in the garden. But I didn’t think either when Viola was pulled out of me and I saw her headed my way.

We list everything we saw today. We talk about our favorites as if we will go back. As if this is about distance and not turning pages.