#MIDDLEBURY
The Bed on the Wall
Lauren Camp
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.
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@poets.org.
(c) 2016 Lauren Camp. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
