Thursday, October 27, 2016

Without Me They are Nothing (Without Them I’d be, Too)



More of my creatures now insist they want four feet.
They say that while I manage well enough at sketching
heads, I'm not convincing at evincing the acceptable

proportions that should properly inform the limbs of bipeds.
Some decree they won’t agree to be unless I turn them into
quadrupeds. They say I'm tolerably good at drawing those.

I’ve thought of threatening to morph them into hunchback
trilobite-cum-ptarmigans sans feathers, dead-eyed
and grotesquely fat. (No idle threat. I’ve drawn a few

like that.) But collectively they’d thumb their nose. I’ll never
carry out the plan. Try to & they'll slip back into their abyss
as quickly as they can – insuring that I’ll never draw another

woman, trilobite or man. Still I'm tempted to inform the one
who yearns to be a quadrupedal Queen of Sheba: sure,
I gladly will oblige, and then with molto chiaroscuro

make her an amoeba. But without me they are nothing
and without them, I’d be too. So chances are they’ll suffer
through whatever feet they get. And I’ll put up with their regret.

But nothing’s carved in stone: no circumscribing law, whose
spirit, if there were, we’d pay more homage than its letter.
And hey, you never know. One day I might draw better.



.

No comments: