Oil Painting For Beginners
The first lesson is Cadmium Yellow Light
burst suddenly from the tubes like a window
freed of its shade and somehow indecent.
We at our easels, stiff as old brushes
silently rehearse the names of the blues
cobalt, ultramarine so watery
that our eyes cloud. Next time you see water,
the teacher says, you'll see its perfect light
hanging in a glass, and a clear window
will seem a lie, no matter how you brush
away the dirt. You've begun a descent
something like love. For tomorrow, learn blue.
In a mathematical stillness of blue
our unworlding begins: not the water-
color's rheumy blindness, hand on the brush not light.
A blank canvas facing into the wind,
a more perilous innocence, the brush
like a weapon, our backs turned decently
on each other's crimes, the indecently
dwarfed horizontals, Cerulean Blue
of the sea's eye, the protean window.
Everything begins to change, to be lit
by the whiteness of its own bones, sea water
now quite inseparable from the brush
whose crude strokes try to heal, make less brutish
the salt realization, this indecent
parading of an ocean like all blue
oceans. Looking out the canvas's window
as from a small room, one knows the water
will be too cold for swimming, the light
too weak to warm us. Best to turn off the light
slip under a sea of blankets, and brush
away hopes of painting, loving, decent
occupations though they are. In the blue
uncertainties of morning, watery
shadow plays dumbly at the window of the heart.