The paintings on the wall of the Clay Center are small but powerful. I have come to them in a deepened and worried frame of mind. I call to Emma to wait, look at the picture, what does it say to you, which one is your favorite? Emma is consumed in the thin presence of Now, and doesn't know what answers I want. She merely tugs at her friend's sleeve, and then embraces her, which would be so awkward if she were grown and her friend was grown. I think to myself, we don't greet each other like that, as adults. I am cut off from the others, keeping Emma in my sight, because I am so unlike them. The good moms. The moms that bake cookies and put bows in their daughters' hair. Emma tucks her hair behind a protruding ear, and I almost audibly gasp at her naivety. Someday she will know she is different. She doesn't see it now, but someday she will exist there on the fringes where the population is spread out like the sheen of butter on a piece of bread. But now, she points to a painting of dots, dots of different colors and sizes. Whose borders, though, are perfectly curved in never ending lines. No paint bleeds outside the dots and their definity. The dots line up like soldiers readying for battle, in perfect formation. There is no room for me, a mom whose imperfection leaves prints in the wooden gallery floor. My dot would be oval, or shaped like an amoeba, blue paint spilling from its irregular shape. One painting is called "Melting Shadows", a modern looking thing of a painting, and I think of black-gray streaks on a unclean window. Emma is ready to go.
dissolving descending
in rivulets on the
dirty side of the window
I have forgotten the sun
where do these thin
streams of obscurity
originate out of the
bleak underbelly of the
gray sky I pull back
the rock of the day
dormant for too long
and reveal a tender
place that has no air
to heal light has
shriveled like the skin
of a hand held in water
too long the outside is
melting a candle that
cannot hold its shape
and loses itself over
a silver candelabra
I have become fluid the
tension of the surface
formed by gravity and
the laws of physics which
appears as the only things
that make sense
