Untitled

Untitled

(“The rich and the poor are met together; the Lord is the Creator of them both.” Proverbs 22:2)

I.

He wandered the galleries
circa 1970
of the New Berkeley Art Museum.
The gray concrete Brutalist building
housed Warhol and Pollock,
and in a shaded enclave Richard Brautigan
read,
with easy inebriation,
his newest poetry. It was magical in the 70s;
He was 15 in 1970.

Brautigan paused. Or maybe he finished.
The students who drove through the Caldecott Tunnel
could not be sure.
Some of his poems were scratches on parchment,
some rambled the east bay hills. But, after he
put the last drop of whiskey to his lips and
sat down to light a cigar,
the curious teens wandered the galleries again.

He wondered at some of the installations,
walking around pop art and soup cans
and curious to their meaning,
looked at every label in the gallery.

Untitled.
There was more than one. Un
titled.
And questioned the creativity of
leaving off the name.
For him the title was a gateway to the meaning,
a miniature explanation of the dots and explosions
on canvas or melamine sculptures. There was no one
to ask
when the card read
un
Titled.

He vowed to write an anthology of poetry and,
right in the middle of his collection,
leave one page blank except for the title:

“Untitled”

II.

Half a century later, labels mean less.
Perhaps we come into the world as the perfect
artistic medium.
Perhaps we do not need the titles. They may not
be
gateways to meaning at all,
but a tin box lithograph with “sardines”
on the label.
The name tag was affixed so early
the artist’s name has been forgotten.