using ten words from Wallace Stevens

After the Sunday mornings ended
when she was given words
to blunt her hunger, it building
through two services and Bible study,
until it finally sank to a dull hum of want
while her mom, sustained, giddy really,
came so reluctantly to the task of Sunday dinner

after she left home, Sunday mornings
were the late sleep of the weekends
second day and cooked breakfasts
in the mind of angled light soaking the kitchen,
or out in the iris and rose of the garden
pruning and setting the beds straight.
Rain days too, looking into the steep canyon,
green and light-green, that kind of dependency.

Why would the call of color be so great
if she had nothing of the dance in her,
no aptitude at all for image on surface?
She allowed herself expensive colored pencils,
boxes of watercolor, tubes, brushes,
or bought them for her daughter
for whom color made the same difference
but who, sighting along a still life,
could make it live on paper.

Rain now, in fact, in the misty
fields of ocean spray, hazelnut, and huckleberry.
Swallows which cut the June evenings.
Seeing and light. But not the hand for them.
She loads her brush with color, refusing
to give in to how awkward her work is.
She bends over it,
filling the face shes drawn, empty
except for the thick smudges of eyes, nose, and mouth,
with the stolen beauty of words.

- Alice Derry