Читать книгу The Audible and the Evident - Julie Hanson - Страница 14

My Job as a Child

I spent my childhood filling things in.

I spent my childhood thrown out on the rug,

rubbing crayon on pages

in big thin books

until color spread to the edge of the shape

where a black, pre-drawn line defined it.

I loved the August rhythms

in the action of the hand’s edge against the page,

and the interruption:

the crucial exchange of one crayon

for another in the cardboard box,

one of so many decisions.

I used the point or, more rarely

(and peeled of its paper), the side.

I used short, quick, back-and-forth strokes

or long ones running in the same direction

or filled a circle from the center out

like the iris of an eye.

I applied greater pressure,

leaning heavy over my work,

or held my hand far away

and made bright or dark be faint.

There was the painstaking dotting-it-in,

there were curly hair strokes,

patches, zigzags, waves.

Members of my household

politely stepped over me.

The books were cheap and quiet.

One day an old friend of my mother’s

came to stay with us and reminisce.

I sprawled out on the floor at some remove

from wherever they sat to talk, stuck

like a far star is stuck to its constellation,

and I colored along,

drunk in my deductions . . .

One.) Vi could remember my mother

from a time before she had married.

Two.) Vi had never married anyone herself.

Three.) Vi was an artist.

Therefore, for all of the days of her visit

I listened to their talk

as if any other action on my part

would make it stop.

And when one morning the story did stop

and Vi broke in and said a thing

that seemed to me abrupt and unrelated,

There will be no more coloring books,

I looked up for a clue in her face.

After a pause the story simply resumed.

A package came for me from Kansas

a few weeks after that:

pastels and paints

and two sorts of paper, one slick,

one absorbent. And I spent them all,

imagining a life of it, one thick page

after another,

bottomless, bottomless.

Soon only a smudged assortment was left,

and so I slid out the coloring books

and turned to a page

that hadn’t been done

and began filling-in, no less satisfied

and no happier than before,

for the whole endeavor

was about texture,

more than we might suppose,

and less than we might imagine

a project of fantasy, autobiography, or wish.

The years have come,

and some few memories so slight

that they are hardly what they are.

They are agenda-less and dumb.

They don’t notice that I notice them.