de Born and Motherwell

2 men rang a bell today -
Bertrand de Born,
a soldier, a troubadour,
and Robert Motherwell,
the cave-dweller,
who painted war
and beautiful darkness.

de Born pushed for sin,
sons against father,
didn't win praise from Dante,
who placed him in hell
wandering
head in his hands
singing love laments, satire,
but mostly of deceit,
or praising battle,
poems crafted well
but blood fed,
inglorious.

A framed Motherwell groans
under the weight of its plexiglass,
300 pounds of it,
bowing out into salty sea air
where
the canvas moans
salt sprayed
tasting as a bloodied
lip does.
Motherwell's
war, the dead bulls
of Spain,
are ghosts I feel rise again
in this bleak Midwestern headwind.

Both men are, oddly, connected to me.

I recall when
deBorn blew through my room
in Rocamadour,
an ocean away from where,
a year later,
I painted Motherwell's
old apartment
halfway up a hill
in San Francisco.

Today, during a noontime nap, I dreamt of Pegasus
sleeping in Altamira, next to guns and paintings.

Tonight I ate six pomegranate seeds, wondering
what songs Persephone sang
in the underworld.

All the while deBorn and Motherwell
kept slipping in and out of my mind.