Art Work

November 22, 1991  (I was 47)

                             Art Work

Twenty-eight years after that gray day in Minnesota

(That thankless November began the coldest of winters.)

I’m in Washington D.C. ignoring gray rain,

avoiding wet turf at Arlington Cemetery, and its flame,

standing in the Hirshhorn Gallery, second floor near the escalator.

A Robert Motherwell collage done in November of ‘73

looks at first flippant- a crude presidential portrait

torn from packaging cardboard with two labels attached-

a baggage sticker from JFK airport

and directly above it an inverted mailing lablel

addressed to Motherwell in N.Y. from a California company

called Gemini.

A seam of packing tape bisects the two labels.

The mailing label is part of the right temple of the President’s profile.

The JFK sticker is on his right cheek.

(If the taped seam were folded upon itself,

the label and the sticker would meet face to face.)

The shoulders and the chest of the forward leaning figure

are formed entirely as a larged painted red heart

beneath the cardboard head.

The figure is surrounded by rough-brushed yellow-brown.

Dry brushstrokes in the background color imply the Kennedy hair

around the pasteboard face.

His corrugated eye was meticulously torn,

and then I notice the horrible familiarity

of that forward leaning pose.

And isn’t that a big D brushed in behind the President’s head?

And those spatters of darker brown in front of the throat,

and that faintly indicated right arm reaching

with the hand to the throat.

And the packing tape seam is at the flap

of the awful grassy knoll wound.

And Motherwell’s name is above the seam

though it is still,

at this moment, attached, and the piece

is called Gemini.