Look Dick Look

the thin-faced, young man ahead of me in the grocery check out line kept dithering with his hair near his left temple as if keeping something out of my view. a misplaced love bite? a fungal infection?  he was, by far, not the most comely guy in the store but he sure was the most absorbing.  i can’t stand rembrandt’s bloated history paintings but his self-portraits are universes unto themselves. throughout his rather long life, he stared at himself in the mirror, sometimes garbed in outlandish, anachronistic costumes, sometimes, especially later in life, in just a mere housecoat that spoke of hard times, and i, a dilettante some four hundred years later, is left to befuddlement at the sheer number, no, infinite possibilities of these often dark portraits built up from layers of heavily laid on impasto. it’s as if every one of these self-assessments in oil allow me quite generously to partake of a secret that i and only i know about and there’s plenty others left just waiting for my willingness to look and not just see.