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.
