OCR Text |
Show Moon - 36 my past stir like dust in the attic sunlight. Something has to be put into motion or else these memories will simply swirl around a while and settle back down with nothing done to stop the strange thoughts telling me I shouldn't live. They told me at art school that it takes twenty years to be able to paint, really paint. First you try to express yourself, but it comes out muddy because of impatience. Then you forget all that inner stuff and learn technique, but the craft is so difficult, so self-conscious you forget how to see for a while. You can't see the world and you can't see yourself. According to them, I'm just about on schedule. I'm into blindness dark as the far edge of a midnight sky. But then, there's that other thing they told me: the darkest dark goes next to the lightest light. Queens is where the subway groans to its final stop and the raw edge of New York City bleeds its last before giving way to the green, sea-washed world of Long Island. Somewhere out there lived James's father, Grandpa Tad, but my mother said he liked to be alone and didn't want us to stay with him. Where my mother and I waited for the man called Daddy, everything was brownstone and cement. A fine black soot covered the moldings and windowsills no matter how often my mother dusted. We lived in a single room with a Murphy bed that could be flipped up into the wall. I slept in a cot in a corner behind a yellow bedspread my mother had nailed catercorner, creating for me a room that was a little triangle. |