Later: Filling in the Lines

Art offered something akin to the comparisons and demands of religion,
the double expectation that the cockeyed monsters all feed from when in doubt.
The brain must be banshees to sustain it--like sirens or wailing at night.
And if the painting is not going well, then I am spared nothing,
not even a child's sickliness remembered well these days, that unseen animal.

Surrogate self portraits don't always do anything for the natives of the home either,
believing less in a moody line, willing more to the obvious canons of realism.
My noses were always too big. That was the usual mantra over the masks and
behind masks. Beginning a lifelong pattern, I might slash and burn
to cremate mistakes best left unseen from the unkind artbooks and critics alike.

My parents were among the most abrupt-sounding to a child of eight.

L'absence d'oeuvre

Please be discreet about the depressions as the others tell secrets about your bed.
It's done politely over pastries some Sunday afternoons in lacey acceptance of
how the good girls are to look by weekend's end. At home
the orange juice finds it's way to the back of the refrigerator,
the vodka up front. Cheers to Jesus and sabbaths and the Catholics alike.

The water, the bread were all filled with fire. Such rumors
were libel to break a career by midweek.
I had none, no praecox, no distress, no bundles of Gideons.
Inheritance of the past had more to do with an old rosary and dirty love letters
I kept in a small box in the attic. I must have liked the dichotomy,
or at least a short novena they might have said for me in the event of a miracle.

Difficulties at School

In failing math, I succeeded a lesson unused by the pupils before me.
Even my parents didn't flinch, knowing full well I hadn't memorized my times tables.
By then, we had all chalked it up to retardation which had nothing to do with art.
Monkeys could draw. The task of the century, or at least grade school, was to multiply.
The short walk between the desk and the blackboard was long, flushed,
and much like the odor of urine on a hot day--without its right place or escape.
I fell immediately, once, twice, a third time in this Calvary of distress. The margins
of my notebooks were filled dark with drawings and no education.
The child was born with a certain exquisite, almost painful sensitivity to life.
Every part was delicate--the nerves, the body, the belly health.

Anyone as sensitive as that is bound to fall off the mountain sooner or later.
As one swings into a greater distance from cradle,
the reactions are more intense, more glorious, and much more difficult.