as tufts of hair from the barber’s

chair. The blue sun makes.

The blue shade of a yellow pine.

Television blue. Cadmium blue.

Blue twisted into the spools

of your DNA, forking into two

directions. Blue darkening

your knees. The blue you miss

because—though it almost

killed you—blue was,

for a season, your home.

5.

There was another … incident.

If I describe how the officer treated

the young woman’s body, I am also

describing the color

of my body.

6.

Then the last piece, a solemn veil lifted

and tossed to the fl or. I know the history

of my body is a pair of hacked off ands

playing the piano. Day after day in the artist’s

studio, I smell the melon’s ripe decay.

I draw a second body, then a third, and so on.

My bodies reveal nothing and conceal

nothing. Pin-up beauty, runaway, Venus

of the Circus Act, nightwalker, wet nurse,

odalisque, reclining nude. The women are me

and are not only me. Ours are the only eyes.

We construct our seeing as clay or wood

into figurines of air. We perceive their shapes

and uses just as wind is seen by watching leaves.

These are the paintings I make of myself.

Art is drawn on the cave of my body.

There are as many walls inside me

as there are bones at the bottom of the sea.

It matters little how small I am in the pool

of another’s eye. It’s awe or indiff rence

I crave. I want to be seen clearly or not at all.

The moon is an eye flung open, useless

without a pupil. It soothes me, this not seeing.

Painters have gone blind staring at the sun.

At the center of a hurricane is an eye,

in the midst of which one believes

the storm is over. A woman’s face can break,

fall as quickly as night. Sometimes, when I cry,

all of the eyes which are mine—painted, sketched,

photographed—begin to shed blue tears. I catch them

in my hands or with pots and pans. Or let them fall

as drifts of snow. I eat them by the fistful.

When you look at me, in our most intimate

exchanges, you drape my nakedness

in a fabric I neither sewed nor bought. You pin

my beauty with a tack against the wall, or me against

a four-poster bed: thighs splayed, nipples spilling

spoiled milk. In every light, the fact of history

strips me blue. These are the conditions. The point is

to go on. Drawing myself, as water from a well,

I can no longer believe in an innocence

that was never mine. It is impossible to draw

a self-portrait without the other women figured

onto my flesh like barnacles fixed to a gray whale.

I am rough to touch. I am the yellow song

of a blue pain. The women and I walk

a tightrope of night. Our eyes adjust to growing