-the rediscovered painting-

It’s been three decades; more, I think

and nearly forgotten, but now I’m obsessed.

somebody had it, I assumed. but who had it?

I couldn’t ask around. I’d feel like an idiot.

“I wasn’t even born then” most would say.

but jesus christ, three decades gone or more and then

there it is, mailed to me in a stiff corrugated envelope,
the painting oiled-up in caucasian flesh tones broad and milky,

warmer in a few places around the plane of the face.

I was looking to Derain back then and all the Fauves.

I looked to Vlaminck and Matisse, with his on-again-
off-again "wild beast" attitude.

I looked to Bonnard and Vuillard, too. the Nabis,––
then put them all aside and began to paint the picture:

"portrait of a young woman", a girl, actually,
younger than me who lived up the street behind

the drugstore toward the Sons of Italy Hall.
I imagined her as a young woman I would never come to know,
now grown enough to paint, too many years or better said, a lifetime away.

the picture is busy with paint, but it looks unresolved to me now.

(I could have used a narrower brush to make those strokes)
and the soft-brushed blending of forms on one side of her face is
something I'd like to define more clearly, but I won't.

the painting is skull-deficient, its colors do not drape.

there's nothing of substance beyond its colors,

it's flat as a pancake, the eye moves along a horizontal line,

and between the poles and besides, it’s not so easy to paint

as a wild beast through the lens of a common life.

what did I know?

I didn't live the way of any of them, but
I once lived as young a life as the girl who lived up the street.

It’s said that old Matisse, sitting in a broad, soft easy chair,
shawled, white-haired and chubby, painted with a brush attached to a wand
so that the surface could be seen more clearly, and living doves
were flying, fluttering ‘round and ‘round in there!
I didn't realize the full measure of what it was I was up to, but
I knew a thing or two about the girl who lived up the street
and that was enough.

who knew interior doves on the wing as well as Matisse?
who remembers the girl who lived near the Hall as well as I?

who knows what's left undone with this old paint,

once accomplished, now recovered, once dismissed,
when I was young enough not to know any better?