ManicDDaily

By Seraphine Louis

What I love–  (painting oranges from the imagined perspective of Seraphine Louis, an outsider artist)

–That when I hold a brush
I go away,
that only the eyes
stay.

And the orange.

As a child, I’d pull the sheet full-up
so that no one else could see
the pale blue me
breathing shallowly cloth’s suffocated folds,
but this moment’s neither muffled blue
nor me, but the airy light of orange,
where canvas is freely taut and breath
comes in the easy vein
of leaves, vining.

Sometimes, they are one eye
that inhales the altogether,
but mostly the eyes are many–
they peer from my grip
on the brush and from the tip
of the brush itself,
as it redampens in the blink
of pigment,
and as it looks up too,
in the quickened stare
of the I that is not there.

The tip circles up, around,
a twirl that could dance the sun, the moon,
that could pirouette any
planet, but arcs right now
an orange,
this truly and forever only orange,
until the next one.

The peekhole of the orange looks out at me,
that place that once connected it
to green,
the peekholes of all the oranges.
I don’t need to press them to my eye
knowing as I do what they do hold–the souls
of oranges-
able, with brush in hand,
to see into them
from arm’s length, and maybe even
from a greater distance.

******************************************************

I’m calling this one a draft.  It is written belatedly  for the prompt of  Fireblossom, (Shay of Shay’s Word Garden)  on With Real Toads to write about an image of Seraphine Louiw, a naive/outsider artist, who ended life in a mental institution, not painting.  Look at Shay’s wonderful prompt to read more, but the poem really has to do with painting, I think, and its absorptions, especially for someone who approaches it without all the concerns of a more established/professional painter.