You enter my studio and sit, asking for a portrait.
Make me pretty, you said. You wanted it with all the right hues:
a soft pink tint, on your cheeks, reminiscent
of summer days, running without care
across fields of grass, a landscape conjured from memory; your eyes,
you wanted them perfect like almonds
contained in chocolates hailing from distant Italy. I try to explain
how there is so much more to this art – the arduous necessity
of catching light by surprise. See, an artist is made
to learn these things. Hands are made used
to aching, and these eyes, they know what is hardest to see:
what’s in front of you. Everything that you call
from memory is a trick of light. What the mind fails to hold
the face is sure to keep with it. A thousand folds telling a story
each time – creased on its pages.
Your smile: lopsided, trying
too hard. You fix your hair, attempting to hide the slightly hairless patch
of skin your lover used to kiss. You tell me how you have aged,
the word resounding like rough charcoal on paper. You tell me
another story, about the color of the sea in the past, I try to keep
my strokes faithful: faint lines across your face, tinged
with something still, perhaps, beautiful. I would have shown you the playfulness
of shadows: the contours of your cheeks – rose madder, not carnation
as you insist. I could have contained
what luster remained in your old eyes. Already is it too cloudy
to see? Look at the story your thin lips tell as it struggles
to smile. I could have given you so much – yet too easily you render me a liar,
paying me to give you something that already belongs to the past.
