The Model

In this wheelchair drawn across the cotton sheets
of artists, across blameless desire, metal
has a smell half as wide as wood, half as wide
as blue skies seem to green. Love makes fear
in the erasure of distance, in the tumult
when we come too close, when the sky clouds
the ground in Victorian green, in the needy rain
and hail. From this atlas, the students map
the parallax of loss - pencils scratching
in arcs like bees who take aim on the marigolds
in my yard. Approximations of the sun,
a world without objects. The color creeps
quietly out of my skin, out of the minds
of women who ink children into their dreams.

Draw my skin in cross-hatch silence; make a flesh
of shadow, of the template of seduction when lovers
stand this close - of the standard chill of autumn
brought on by our birthing. I am a small someone
and the trees are made of broccoli, crisp and cool
like the spiny fingers of a woman snatching
marigolds from sleep, or icicles dropping like pencils
made mad by fat tears when seen at a distance. Words
spill like graphite, the soft flesh masking the silence,
the hard wood cradling the loss.