STRANGE PASTURE

     after Robert Rauschenberg

A taxidermist had already done his handiwork

when you came along and rescued me 

from a New York City shop window.

You cleaned me up, tended to my fleece,

married me with a tire,

daubed my snout with acrylics of many colors,

installed me at the center of a canvas on the floor

adorned with the detritus of the everyday: 
a strange pasture.

I became part painting, part sculpture.

A Combine, you called me.

An enigma open to interpretation.

Here I stand, your most famous survivor,
facing modernity like a monogram 
stitched into the tarpaulin of time.