The Artist at Seventy-Five
The men all want someone younger,
she says. She paints a likeness
of her cup, leaving the bent cream heart
for the paper to represent, an absence
she’s seen too often pulsing on a screen,
then stilled. Paging back through the notebook,
the hues—blue porch of a shored-up house,
auburn hay coiled in a field—
she dismisses them as sketches. Turning
to a new sheet, she says, What I miss
is touch. There’s a sound in her brush,
water from the bursting tip
filling the marsh of the paper,
distant crackle of dry land drinking.
A mountain stands up to the sky.
Thin hairs spark wings of birds.
