A stiff body length between it and me: the venerated pinnacle of Early Renaissance panel painting, the polyptych Madonna of Mercy by Piero della Francesca. Dignified, it stood, shrouded in moisture control and surveillance cameras on the first floor of the Museo Civico di Sansepolcro in Tuscany. I felt my eyelids slide into the hole behind my watered eyeballs. Biblical bodies of precise geometry contained colors pure. Clear and complete, these paneled portraits told a singular familial tale: Refined Marys, Jesuses and Johns testified from leaves of gold. Each bright figure wedded the fine, compact outline of its neighbor without bleeding or smudges. Awe warmed my breath and slowed its rhythm until it hung noiselessly beside my unmoving eyes. I stared and then wandered up a staircase in search of a respite from looking.

Gripping the stone walls in between attic windows were the molded fragments of a decaying frescoed map. Washed out municipalities, rotting territories of greens, grays and alizarins clung to quattrocento plaster. Those decrepit walls and the panel painting downstairs had identical palettes, their materials almost duplicate. The master and its dying bastard cousin. Each painted in the same century, in the same spirit of tribute to their patrons, the city and God. One boasted geometrical narrative while the other dangled muddled half-tales with no visible conclusions.

Upstairs, beauty came undone. Countries seceded. Flags tethered. Saliva dripped to my sandal. It was as if I had snuck up on that perfect Madonna and pressed my eyes into the back of her dress, into the detail, into the unruly and civilized grit. There, in the cracks, I felt with squinted eyes for my own innumerable beginnings, endings and climaxes. Silently aroused, I swayed before the continuous, tactile disarray. Communal decay. Buenos Aires twenty years after the fall of the dictatorship. Countless posters, aching for reform, hang themselves from concrete buildings and wrought-iron fences. Exhausted by cars and sun, they unfasten themselves onto streets and grass. They clothe the dog parks and the middle-class neighborhoods like parasols or condoms. Two-dimensional wishes—grade-school magenta on reams of peroxide or army green—tickle my ankles. They grab at my hair. “­Justicia Hoy!” “San Telmo No Olvida.”Seattle. Rusted staples carry weathered poster remnants and colonize dead trees called utility poles. They present artifacts of our recent selves—a concert, a state initiative, a lost cat. Lift a layer of words and uncover a layer of images. That band that once brought us all fame. Vegetarian. Pepperoni. Dukakis. Lift a layer of images and uncover a new layer of words. Words more clean and complete than the ones on top. YOU CAN. TIME. SEE. “Don’t walk” flashes, and I am caught on the curb, stealing my fingers lengthwise over the punctured wood.

Before rush hour and at Sunday sunrises I can watch myself embrace flaking metal tacks. I can rub flared nostrils across heaving, crusty paper.

The slippery ochre ring around a public toilet bowl. Sunflowers murdered by their namesake. I’ve trained myself to compensate. I’ve outwardly conformed. In the privacy of my mouth, my tongue practices communion with alleyway concrete and tacky-tape residue. Lips sealed, I love the hairs in a yellowing scab.