Todd Portnowitz

A barge has stopped moving entirely.
The sun has stopped setting
on the lip of a bluff
to a skipping record of birdsong
and laughing children.

Something is moving, it must be,
something the artist can't freeze
in a twilight landscape,
though even in casting the spell
the wand stands still.

What then is being bought
in a third-rate Picasso
for seventy-nine million dollars
but a fleck of stopped time,
the chance to fidget

in a cube of ice
and wait for sunrise?
Who'd ever raise
such baroque opposition
to the earth's rotation?

When Goliath fell he fell
and the stone fell with him.