by Rebecca Laughlin
Dear Beloved,
For reasons I do not know, I am sad this morning and come to you with aching heart. Yesterday I put out my paints and started. Working from the wheelchair is new. My left hand can't hold a brush in the same way: it's too bent. But it still can hear my eyes. I made a start: small canvas, charcoal drawing - can't spray the fixative - of a vase of soft roses past their time, abstracted as I painted. I was at work for a couple of hours and my feet hurt not at all. It's new to have setting up so complicated and awkward and fabulously familiar to use a brush, feel the sensuality of the oils, meet the canvas with color, find line and space. Afterwards I knocked the whole thing over when maneuvering the chair between the easel and the wood stove. The canvas fell face up and I laughed relieved.
I am a painter yet. Tears rise up in me remembering you ask me for fifty of my paintings to make three hundred with yours. I think of you feeding the five thousand and eat the love you dream me. It's new to be me with in-my-face handicaps in the face of the sweet passion I have to paint. Please help me. I am opening your letter and remembering that you find me. Please come with me to the studio and open my hands and eyes to paint. Yesterday's canvas looks a landscape of my heart.
Morning light is making platinum the birch, flaming its every twig. I feel you stripping me to the bone, making an armature for you incarnating me.