Art of Revision
Indigo. Amaranth. Magenta. Willow. Dusk. You have to choose. When to layer, where to darken. You want the angle of the light, the direction of its falling, to be consistent. This is how you give depth to a figure that has only warmth and a finite amount of time. This is how you make them believe you: his hands, kneading the dough for the bread-maker we will use every week for one year exactly. His snoring with the dog-eared recertification exam book yellowing on his lap while the rain picks off needles from the evergreen. The way rose hasn’t left the rims of our eyes since we arrived. He doesn’t give up talking to God. At some point I think he must begin to suspect it’s a one-way conversation, though he still insists that a choice not aligned with God’s will is a mistake. In other words, a choice is not a choice or it is something you have to pay for. At least the performance of a conversation is free. God is a poem to recite over and over when what one feels, what one desires, eviscerates in the morning air. He kneels on the freshly vacuumed balding carpet in a freezing room with emerald windowpanes, holding our hands, saying, Father. The bus she rides to the mountains is cobalt; then, for twelve hours she horseshoes her spine over a silver desk, one of hundreds of women who have shed their tribes, families, languages, their old weapons, to cross the ocean, to be counted among the fluorescent angels of capitalism. On her way home, an asteroid splashes on the face of the earth. Believe it or not, this happens every day. You have every color before you and the margins of every page in your school notebook asking for a more radiant life. He won’t go to bed until you are done, because you might make a mistake; the coloring pencils, oil-based, the only things in the apartment not purchased from a thrift store or a garage sale, are non-erasable. Of course, he cannot help you. You are not a poet. You are making a wolf. You are making a hatchet.
