After Robert Rauschenberg's "Bed,"
oil and pencil markings on pillow, quilt, and sheet, 1955
So garish: the arc of his interior
thinking. So red,

so deceptive. The coordinates of this project fall
between sheets and box spring:

the command of horizontal passage.
The bed soaked

with the overlapping tongue
of his brushes, with pattern interruption, the departure

from edges. Let's say he is within
his composition. Inside

his story. As he tips
the paint, the objective can be taken

altogether away until he detects
only desire: a rough strike

of purple
censured from exuberance. The room remains

with the weeping wreckage
all around, and the panels

in the corner
beaded with aggressive desperate skins.

Below the window, the dirty
city, its permanent

tensed distances, its hungry
catastrophes, its bare

windows. His pillow is creased. It tells everything
we need to know. Each drip, directionless.



About this poem
"This poem focuses on 'Bed,' one of Robert Rauschenberg's 'combine' paintings, a series in which he mixed found objects and paint with a structural support to make something that 'acts in that gap' (his words) between art and life."
-Lauren Camp

About Lauren Camp
Lauren Camp is the author of "One Hundred Hungers" (Tupelo Press, 2016). She lives in Santa Fe, N.M.

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The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day[at]poets.org.


(c) 2016 Lauren Camp. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate