Dale Champlin, Anatomy, Collage, 2021
Boy Impastoed
I don’t realize it
until it is almost over.
(Is it almost over?)
How you were being
buried in paint.
That time,
that terribly violent
time. You gasped up at me
out of the night canvas,
at the stoplight,
not far from the McDonald’s.
(See all of the lights,
the red tail-light warnings,
the yellow humps of piss-stain,
in the terribly
pedestrian universe.)
I was ratcheted
from my silence,
in an instant
nearly stillborn,
a white gaudy rabbit,
upon the beat
that might have been
your annihilation.
(Literally, you were listening
to “The End” by The Doors.)
Then months of pain
and bouts of prescriptions.
Now that I hear your voice
return,
I sense the daubing
that was smothering your body,
sometimes black,
sometimes white,
is allowing you to return,
become realized once more.
You metamorphose
visible,
your trickling voice
a draught
once again
filling
your precisely
cambered chamber,
beloved blue-hued bottle.
_____________________
Erin Wilson