Sunflowers & Dark Paint was Previously published in Waterways 26.5 (2005): 4-6
A painter
who cannot afford paint
will wash his brushes,
keep them clean.
Li Chin Pao hung
his brushes from the ceiling
of his shack
their vulpine tips immaculately
like pencil
points
down
reminding Li,
needling him.
Li turned on them
and walked for days.
Collapsing with fatigue
and hunger,
he found shade
and seeds
in a grove of wild sun flowers.
Idly scraping the stalks’ skins
with his thumbnail,
he uncovered a snow-white wood
that wanted sculpting.
Li peeled hundreds of stalks
for hundreds of days until
he learned to sliver a paint-thin
density to fashion
back beneath the brushes
art:
a snow-wood locust
gnaws a bamboo leaf
a caterpillar descends
a branch of a cherry tree
At the Sunday market,
Li’s snow-wood paintings
dazzle all who pass
but they pass
for what wife wants
a locust in her home?
what husband hangs
a downward spiral in his office?
A painter
who cannot afford paint
cannot afford to see
the world
upside down.
So Li’s caterpillars
turned upward with a flip of a frame
and rabbits munched where
locusts once plagued his world,
and Li sold snow-wood enough
to capture the truth
elsewhere
with brushes and paint.
