Monica Berlin

EXHIBITION OBJECTS, THEY’RE CALLED, BECAUSE I GUESS

you can only say art so many times when you
are an art museum or because maybe naming
any artifact art presupposes something, though
I guess I can’t be sure what. I came to the Met
to wander, to look, to stare long at one hundred
& nine objects made & made miraculous by
Gerhard Richter, over six decades, though it
isn’t being called a retrospective, & I’m not sure
why or if it matters except that Richter’s long
thought does feel both sequential & spatial,
linear & out of time, without it & dependent
on history & all those cultural markers, shared
images, our collective recognition that serves
as catalogue, what becomes memory. Sometimes
in papers students cling to poem—the subject
of our work, all of it—& repeat the word with
such frequency I fear I’m losing my mind, can’t
make sense of a single sentence. As if I didn’t
know. As if I was not the intended audience.
As if we hadn’t sat shoulder to shoulder weeks,
pages between us, long enough for them to know
my pronunciation rhymes with home, meaning in
these lines we might find a way to live. O, I am
roaming again. So, then back through galleries, &
not all paintings, even though the show’s called
Painting After All, & the most startling appear to
be panes of glass made into sculpture that hold
light & reflect everything elsewhere in proximity
& refract it too, these multiple frames fragile &
not, which recall those portraits of his children,
his beloveds, & his signature blur, & September,
& those others that don’t hang here but always
echo. I spend half the night in what I imagine
a museum all my own, then wake & stroll back
again, & keep returning to the show’s title, that
after, that all, to Richter’s own hauntings, which
are also all our hauntings, keep being so, & to
what might be his greatest stroke of genius, how
he paints his children simultaneously looking &
looking away.

MONICA BERLIN (1973–2022) is the author of the poetry collections Elsewhere, That Small and Nostalgia for a World Where We Can Live, and, with Beth Marzoni, co-author of No Shape Bends the River So Long. She directed the creative writing program at Knox College, where she served as the Henke Distinguished Professor of English.