Small Talk

Small Talk

He does not seem to see her breasts, this man
who smells of nothing, whose flesh
lacks a sense of purpose. She tells him,
“I have no sense of fear. “He corrects her,
“You would, if I put you in a canvas.”
She is at the end
of her fifth month as a hotel manager.
The palm trees on the boulevard
speculate this about her. She rents
an apartment on the outskirts of town, that has
a touch of undernourishment. There are
paradoxes in the maniacal pools of neon
and the softness of the edges of the grass
They walk together. She has been silent since
he offered to put her into his art.
“Perhaps there is something I am afraid of,” she confesses.
“And that is?”
“Well…. what if I am absent? What if you are not
the painter you promise to be,
What if there is no capture?” she blurts out.
“No capture or nothing to be captured,” he wonders out loud.
The trees sway without memory of doing so,
the night resplendent with dull banished stars.
She has been offended for several minutes now,
her quiet enough for her to notice,
a man without hands begging for dimes.
“Why don’t you offer to paint him?” she inquires.
“Because he is too colorful for the grays I work with.”
“And me?” her offense noted in his grin.
“You,” his grin broadens, ‘are like a letter to the absent.
It’s written, it’s in the mail,
but we will never know the color
on the receiver’s face when they read it
because it’s not assured he will ever read it….
The fact we do not know the answer to that question,
is that what makes you a fascinating art subject.”