A Poem I Wrote and Determined Would Be Appropriate to Share in this Arena

Perhaps you, in all the mornings

of all your life, together

Have spent more hours on your hair

Than Botticelli spent on all the

red gold tendrils

that crest the head of Venus

as she’s born.

Seurat, with every calculated

point he paints could not

have known

like your mother knows

how it is to worry, Is this girl turning out right?

Will she need an umbrella here today? The sun is bright.

And how strange, stranger—

That I could not pass that canvas on a wall

without falling to my knees,

or wanting to.

While you I pass with glance steadfastly fixed

upon my shoes.