June 18, 1999

“Ha, it’s done,” she said.

The paintbrush a glinting cobweb,
or her wrist, dangling in the air
as if to waiting for the daybreak rousing of its next
fever. A split second. “It’s done?” she asked,
surveying the fulsome scape
of the canvas.

“The picture of safety,”
the artist decided one morning, told me in piercing and impatient tones
at the core of the broad crest
of her living room/studio. Seeds of paint spray everywhere.

Just then, a bright blob of quaking crimson
made its way down the slant of her bottled filigree tray;
there, propped on an uneven end table,
poised precariously on the air
against nothing- defiant, as it were.

The iced cobalt of her eye
became vapor when she painted, and her face
a study of fissures
the very wrinkles, the slits that sought to undermine
Time’s whispered insecurity- those static, castrate conditions.

Imagine, so slight a woman
making a canvas yield to her like that.

I’d swayed there.
Watched the swelling preludes.
Now in front of her,
further, the picture evolved.

What, exactly, does security look like?
Is it her lock boxes
balanced atop iconography…
is it a blonde, closely shorn head,
the smell of leather,
default crosses or well-rehearsed prayers…
is it stifling familiarity?

A wily old gal, silver mop and
malformed spinal cord- she’s the shape of a question mark.
Lizzie liked to talk Tuesday afternoons:
God, how unsafe the world is,
how one had everything- and nothing-
to do with the other.