1 she’s the delicate head of a young woman in Agnolo Bronzino’s drawing; she says, ‘Look. You can look; look, I don’t really mind; and if you feel shy, I’ll have my eyes and face down all the while’ and in her charm she says: ‘We’ll leave repressed debaters about lust and propriety far behind; I want you to look and you want to; that’s all that matters between us’ a man can look all the while as she has eyes down forever; a beauty unreachable just a piece of paper maybe and mostly bits of dots and pixels in cyberspace
2 could we have lived darling, in the same space and time I might have followed where you beckoned; I might have beaten Agnolo Bronzino with a Michelangelo skill; but now perhaps I’ll copy and paste and post my image beside yours somewhere in cyberspace and perhaps when I’m not watching my image will walk over to yours and you might look up at my avatar and you’d say: 'Sweetheart, what took you so long?' And the two of you might just run away like cheeky teenagers and run through various sites and run across everyone’s screen; and as the two of you get along and chat about times and love and the arts of love and such matters I might be asleep or be at a meeting and I’ll have a strange feeling a cool sensation all over my body and I’d say to whoever is beside me: *'You know, something’s happened in cyberspace… a strange love thing between an image of me and the delicate head of a young woman…'
companion art to this poem: drawing by Agnolo Bronzino (Italian, 1503–1572) Head of a Smiling Young Woman in Three-Quarter View, ca. 1542–43