ART & MATHEMATICS

In the museum she takes off running, jumps
into one of Thiebaud’s slide-down-a-waterfall
streets, vertiginous & curvy, hops
into a fancy car teetering
on the crest of a hill, careens around
telephone poles & cars & UPS trucks,
down & around the steepest hills, makes a big
swoopy swerve through Marina Green, dodges
gamboling dogs, kite-flying kids,
tattooed nannies pushing strollers,
& heads straight on toward
white sails & whitecaps stippling the water,
bridges shining—one silver, one orange—
            helps herself to sweet-potato pie
            & a pinch of lemon-yellow 7-layer cake
            & listens to Mr. Tweed-Cap-Know-It-All
            intoning about Thiebaud’s clever insertion of algebra
            & geometry into the streets, the cars, even the desserts—
            x + y, green (x), blue (y)—that building & that yield
            sign a perfect parallelogram, he says,
& she is in & out of the paintings, eating sweets,
feeling the salty, foggy air swish by as the fancy car lurches
uphill again past the chocolate factory, & she thinks
about the fat-bottomed bowls cupping a scoop
of vanilla &, oh, that hot fudge, waxy coating
on her tongue, whipped cream as white as isosceles sails
on the bay in fog-filtered Thiebaud-ish light.