A Group of Sixty-Seven
after Jin-Me Yoon’s A Group of Sixty-Seven, 1996[1]
It was not my place to wonder at the gleam of sixty-seven Asian busts
whose backs are turned to me. Not my place to wander the balustrade
a downward dog, my lolling tongue dragged across balusters, concrete,
tasting of vitamins, a teat of the-brush-off. Afterall, I said five
when the lady asked how much would you like to pay because
I am in the process of mitigating my water bill, taking my showers
to the governor’s box that is my grandmother’s condo for assisted-living.
I taught the old mule her second pledge of allegiance, the names
of the fifty states she’s allegedly a citizen of, and the four
most recent presidents. In return, she taught me how to pick clean
a neighbor’s tree of its nickel-sized plums. How to protect my investment
with fertilizer laid down in the cover of night, and how to contribute
such a jumble of identities I loom over the block like a bowheaded whale,
my bowed-at-the-waist neighbors spread like termites, or a pile
of tiny jars of jam stolen from the Victorian hotel downtown.
She is the one who made me so grand and loving, so ready
to cuss in a thick language the sixty-seven Asian busts whose
backs are turned to me. Gleam must be the film in my eye
not the plastic sheathes their films keep safe in. Sixty-seven men
and women post shipment. Post settlement in the art of a new
country, their eyes risked in a gaze to look their fill on brown
and green figureheads of trees in a wood of paint,
after taller men and women clear-cut their path for them into
the unimportant wall every painting to ever grace this section of land
has hammered steel nails through, reaching with rust the guts of plaster
in what has been accused a performance of ambition. These Asian
figures asked to dress themselves before their upper thirds are
transferred to an instigator like moi, while their feet are saved
to walk home in the open road after a shoot that pleads then pays
them to get silly on Emily Carr’s aged, acrylic fumes, faint
but for the metal frame, one for each piece, enclosing
each bust with its muse as if for privacy during lovemaking,
only it’s the same muse over and over again, sixty-seven
times over, a race on repeat racing to wear nice but not
ridiculous shirts, ties, open jackets, patterns, obvious silk and
one costume, pink and Korean, all if it lying in wait at the back
of my closet of skins. Which shirt would I have worn? Would I have
been naughty and licked the lead off the painting, an original you know?
What shit would I have thrown when it tasted like nothing
I could have predicted? When it tasted like
future crime?
[1] Yoon, Jin-Me. (1996). A Group of Sixty-Seven [chromogenic prints]. Vancouver, B.C.: Vancouver Art Gallery