Inspired by portraits and a video installation in the Museum’s current exhibition, Time and Tide Flow Wide: The Collection in Context, 1959—1973, Dominic Bellido ’24 writes a series of haikus, fragmented poems, and prose in creative response to the exhibition’s questions of history, time, and the economic forces that influence American people and art.
These writings are dedicated to Marisa C. Sánchez, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow for Research and Scholarly Engagement at the Colby Museum’s Lunder Institute for American Art, curator of the Time and Tide Flow Wide exhibition.
I.
The first face I see
stands behind a white cage. Head
dress, beads mountainlike
on a woman’s face.
Turquoise jewelry draping
a mask, threaded strings
of rain, how much? How
much for this picture? Priceless
necklace, silver tears
gathered from the ground,
cast into fine chains that throw
stories with their light.
Constellation of
pendants dangling, her neck
shielded by rainbow
stones, carved up prayers
from all corners of the land.
O, beaded headband,
your history speaks
for itself. Your women take care
of all your unfinished
corners. But what
of my reflection in
your gaze?
Am I worthy?
II.
See the boy on the bicycle. See the walls
that he must stand between. Is his face worthy
now, God? How long has someone waited
to see him? They say the only body worth my time
is the one with the highest price. Like endless
red blush, or filigree lace. Cold disdain from the other
pale portraits on display. I look down at the boy’s
hands and hear a wail break out of the room’s corner,
a song strung up along the gauze of white
light bulbs. A warm voice. The hung up faces can only
listen. It’s no one’s fault, how my heart breaks
when I remember the portrait can only move inside
our heads. I wonder what the boy on the bicycle
would think of the sound castling him and his frame.
They pray that walls never learn
to talk, but I know that to each God
you must bargain with different rules.
Everything has a price. Anything can
be bought; the only damn question is
what are you willing to sacrifice?
But the heaven marketplace
ain’t as golden as it sounds, boy.
The best customers always come
back for more.
III.
I step into the room at neither the beginning nor the end of the film. I take a seat. The film shows me a woman smoking out a window, a muted hymn drifting out like her cigarette ash spirit. In the next scene, she blazes up a flute that pierces through another song.
The film reels through more bodies, collaging white men in pressed suits, a gospel man, black father looking for job with moonbore eyes. I see supermarket aisles, billboards, pretty white faces on rows of bean cans; then, a hallway of library doors leading nowhere. A woman stands by the bookstacks, eyes closed against a devil’s voice proselytizing her on how to sell to her own kind, how to buy, how to play all these games that have the same damn winner.
But her hymn persists. Like a promise. A war bellow, a moan, a cry for any God to climb up the throat of dawn and give us something.
But not just anything. Not freedom, not the way it’s advertised. All these times, I’ve kneeled at church, and all I’ve ever asked for was another way out. The key to the backdoor or a bank vault. Something that’ll make me feel better, God. But this song cuts at something deeper. No! God, give me a knife instead, so I can slice through the film’s ancient maps, tired graphs that calculate the buying power of the poor. Lines that go up and down and take bodies with them. Let me be the last face the devil sees at his stand. That’s all I ask for, God.
I lean back on the bench and watch the film reel itself around me
the drumsound snaking out of every speaker
forming the stage for an old dance.
Not the way my mother taught me. Not the way
the screen has shown. I leave the room
and walk around, looking for a mirror,
any mirror. I put on a song
from my father’s time.
I dance for
hours
or at least
until I feel someone
watching me. Until the song ends. Until
the steps outline my
patterned past, like beads strung out
on a spider’s web.