you can only say art so many times when youare an art museum or because maybe namingany artifact art presupposes something, thoughI guess I can’t be sure what. I came to the Metto wander, to look, to stare long at one hundred& nine objects made & made miraculous byGerhard Richter, over six decades, though itisn’t being called a retrospective, & I’m not surewhy or if it matters except that Richter’s longthought does feel both sequential & spatial,linear & out of time, without it & dependenton history & all those cultural markers, sharedimages, our collective recognition that servesas catalogue, what becomes memory. Sometimesin papers students cling to poem—the subjectof our work, all of it—& repeat the word withsuch frequency I fear I’m losing my mind, can’tmake sense of a single sentence. As if I didn’tknow. As if I was not the intended audience.As if we hadn’t sat shoulder to shoulder weeks,pages between us, long enough for them to knowmy pronunciation rhymes with home, meaning inthese lines we might find a way to live. O, I amroaming again. So, then back through galleries, &not all paintings, even though the show’s calledPainting After All, & the most startling appear tobe panes of glass made into sculpture that holdlight & reflect everything elsewhere in proximity& refract it too, these multiple frames fragile &not, which recall those portraits of his children,his beloveds, & his signature blur, & September,& those others that don’t hang here but alwaysecho. I spend half the night in what I imaginea museum all my own, then wake & stroll backagain, & keep returning to the show’s title, thatafter, that all, to Richter’s own hauntings, whichare also all our hauntings, keep being so, & towhat might be his greatest stroke of genius, howhe paints his children simultaneously looking &looking away.