There is something terribly wrong with his face--
empty, restless, one side older than the other.
What is a thing? Sediment. A slow river clogged with
silt. I sussed the gesso into foam and white roses,
stalling. I troubled the shadow and silvered his edges.
What can you know about a person? They shift
in the light. You can't light up all sides at once. Add
a second light and you get a second darkness, it's only
fair. He is looking at the wall and I am looking at his
looking. Difficult thing, to be scrutinized so long.
I find the parts that overlap with mine and light them
up in clays and creams, yellow music singing pink,
the flicker of his mouth a purple rust. His face
congeals as he settles in. His hair is bronze in here,
not gold: walnut, bark, and cinnamon, chipped brick
tipped in ink. My shadow falls across his face, blue milk
and pistachio, his eyes shine like wedding rings. My
shadow falls across him and it doesn't go away. Some
hours later the light has shifted, the floorboards
creak. You can't paint the inside of anything, so why
would you try? Painting the inside of anything is
dangerous. I imagined my wrists broken just enough
to keep the feeling from crawling up my arm.
Dangerous thing: an open arm, an open channel.
All these things, rungs of the ladder. Lovers
do the looking while the strangers look away. It isn't
fair, the depth of my looking, the threat of my
looking. It's rude to shake a man visible and claim
the results. This side of his face, now this side of his
face. His profile up against the tulips. I put down
the brush and walked around the room. Even when
I look away I am still looking. He is inside his body
and I am inside my body and it matters less and less.
Shared face, shared looking. A collaboration.
He didn't expect to be handed over, to be delivered. To be
tricked into his own face. Anyone can paint
a mask. It's boring. And everyone secretly wants
to collaborate with the enemy, to construct a truer
version of the self. How much can you change
and get away with it, before you turn into something
else, before it's some kind of murder? Difficult
to be confronted with the fact of yourself. Opaque
in the sense of finally solid, in the sense of
see me, not through me. The selves, glaze on glaze,
accumulating their moods and minutes. We tremble
and I paint the trembling. I enlarged his mouth
and everything went blurry, a forgery. It might
as well be. And all my fingers turned to twigs. Inside
himself he jumped a little. Why build a room you
can live in? Why build a shed for your fears?
The life of a body is a nightmare. This is my hand
over his face, which isn't his face anymore, revising.
I made a shape of the shape he made, subtracted
what he shared with anyone else. There wasn't
much left but it felt like him, wild and scared.
It was too much to bear. I put down the brush and
looked at my hands. I turned off the headlights of
my looking and let the animal get away.