Verse

Verse First things first, I say, you’ve got to organize the page and establish where the shapes are in space. We’re astronomers, these pencils our telescopes, her face a distant constellation. Show us, they say as I loop ovals across white paper. It’s not about getting it perfectly but getting it down, honing happens later, these are approximations or approaches, birds in flight that will eventually land, which, according to their frowns, is a load of claptrap.

Verse

Verse So I talk planes, saying everything is faceted, the face a soft diamond. Their temples flutter with exasperation, their hands with mild panic and I don’t understand snaps like an elastic at the soft inner wrist of my patience.

Verse

Verse “Can I touch your face?”

Verse

Verse I press that cliff wall of understanding, cheek and brow into which I’d push a geology of drawing. Concavity, I say, and protrusion; it’s all planar. Three fingers lifted, shifted, placed against cartilage, muscle, the gentle upholstery of flesh. See? But what I really mean is: Feel? Your face, facing so many directions.

Verse

Verse They’ve got the goon show going, malformed potatoes, eggs wearing wigs, Nefertiti’s neck, their drawings are hydrocephalic and

Verse

Verse in a flash I’m back at crip-camp, London, Ontario, and my beginnings as an art teacher: With every busload I’d hide in the arts-and- crafts cabin while they sang, “There might be flies on some of you guys but there ain’t no flies on us.” Half of them no longer alive for me to draw their wonky bravery. By the time they got back on the bus I saw their massive skulls and sloppy grins as just another manifestation of the body’s wide diversity. We were all weightless in that pool.

Verse

Verse Now I’m talking shade and light, the particularities of downy warmth or shine, the grease of the face, its bacon and grist, bumps, knobs, follicles, stray hairs, eyebrows like Nike slogans or wheat fields, the sag where skin, fatigued, no longer resists the planetary pull but you can’t use line because it adds a decade. Areas of tone will bring this forth out of nothing, like we were brought, once.

Verse

Verse I’m using words, the grand obfuscators, to make form clear. Drawing is about looking, I say, for the umpteenth time. Put down what you see and check what you’ve put down against what you see but maybe too much of life is measuring. We press on, fingers to cheek and pencil to page, coming away from these nights like wet noodles because I persist in pulling, from them, such scrutiny as we so rarely offer or receive.

Verse

Verse Our eyes on the beautiful Tati, our hands around pencils with rounded tips. In cross-hatched mass and smudge, some vestige of spirit catches. Decades later, whoever looks at these will see her as we do, tonight.