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| Pablo Picasso, Guernica (detail), 1937 / My old dog Cooper |
i'm in my childhood bed and my feet are cold
there's a watercolor on my desk but it has too much color on the edges, it looks like it's coming apart, the yellow on the bottom falling off the edge in a flat sheet the color of dog piss
soup in a bowl on the floor is the same color, a slice of it cooling in the spoon
the walls are full, josh hartnett, george clooney, the guy from the o.c., oh alright i know his name, adam brody
mulder and clark gable in white shirts
a painting my mom made of me as a girl looking out the window with red light at my back
my face is blue, the curtain is white and slippery in my small hand
these days i feel like a child waiting for my life to begin
there are things you can't do as a child, you have to wait
i knew it wouldn't come easy but i thought it would come easier, time after school laying itself out like a quilt
for awhile i sat in the sun and worked on my tan, i felt stronger
"gathering my strength like a consumptive in the sun," like diane cluck says
preparing for something unknown that would require a whole warm body and the appearance of athleticism or at least
health, emotional flexibility
endurance
now i'm a little brown and my breasts are two white triangles, which i like
but the sun is further away and i have to wear socks at night
once again i search out the heat like a snake
in parking lots, corners of rooms, small squares of sunlight, flickering
i'm jealous of people i know who are getting shows, good jobs, i'm happy for them but i feel so far from a world in which that is possible
this bed with the red sheets, red walls, yellow lips of a man from a cut-up catalog, dark green fleece and the copper folds of his face like the gleaming back of a horse
i make paintings almost every day and when i look at them later and see the gray against the pink in the drape of a blanket i feel a surge which is love for a thing that is mine and not mine
but how do you fill a life, especially one so sick with ambition
rising in my throat when i lay down
unemployment, a long half-sleep
although last time i went to the art institute i didn't feel the itch of what i haven't done
i let all those people each have their moment in my day
not like they really need more moments but it isn't a tally system is it
some of them did what they had to do and it's beautiful
here are two gold-colored bookends shaped like shells, i will bring them to my new apartment when i have one
pay my rent with newspaper clippings from my grandmother in colorado and the pieces of my bottom lip that i have bitten off
bringing tears to my eyes
i read that as a girl margaret atwood wanted to write the great canadian novel and then she did
sometimes i go a whole day without touching anyone, even the dog, because i am using my hands to fan my fire
isn't that what those great painter men did all their lives? was it lonely for them?
i think it feels like selfishness because it is selfishness
for me and them both
though what is selfishness and what is just keeping warm
i can have grace sometimes when i need to and i must call upon it now like so many of us
ruined pride keeps us bobbing at the surface
debt a black rock
what are my abilities and are they in me like diamonds or do i call upon them and have them come to me from some
other place, the field or the street beside it?
a grocery store on the corner has a picture in the window of marilyn monroe, does that mean i am home
today i did not make a painting
does that i mean i will die tomorrow
i want us all to have success, the best kind and on our own terms
i want to love all the people who are better at everything than i am
if they are good enough to let me
