Article.II. - The Gallery

In a poem from Harold Johnson's Citizenship, the speaker says,
. . . in the National Gallery
I stared (again, with vague hope
of riddling the ambiguity of my citizenship)
at the salmon-colored faces
of the first few presidents . . .

In Article.II., Johnson's speaker returns in longer thought to the American presidency: voices from a shattering African-American historical experience confront the institution and get into the faces of one through forty-four.