Poet's Model
Most of the time he doesn't even look at me, his attentions reserved for the season's blunted smell on the air, or the clouds changing their color in the hard evening sun, combing his recollection for some shadow detail in a painting by Vermeer, making a study of the light, the dusty, careworn light- all things I would call secondary. He closes his eyes as though he is listening for something. It doesn't even matter if I'm in the room. We hardly fit, anyway, this butler's pantry where he works so close and airless, our knees touching then not touching. I sometimes think it is like the beginnings of love, but only the beginning, the awkward, improbable first glance. Really, we're not close. Not in that way. Occasionally I'll hear him sighing "hold still, hold still," like some left-hand accompaniment too simple even to require thought, and I'll go back to my reading and wonder how long he's been making those same two words. I tell myself, the compensation is in the incidentals, buried in whatever fleeting sense of importance may come from being the center of attention, the object under consideration. How many of us can claim to have inspired something out of nothing, to have pulled blue ink from the tired and empty air? I know what he'll say better than he does, I know the words he would like to use but can't put his hands on, I know the words he keeps in his pocket but lacks the nerve to let be heard. He tries to think of them as things other than they are: joists and studs maybe, lumberyard pine shot through with ten-penny nails. I know what the words will bear and what they'll let loose. I am, after all, what he's trying to nail down. He keeps me on because I'm discreet. If you're going to go into this line of work, you'd better do it out of love. The hours are long and tedious. When he puts his hands on me it's just to remind himself that I'm real, that there's a starting place to the shadows I cast. Hold still, hold still. I can't tell if he's saying it to me or to the diamonded light-shapes elongating on the floor. He looks down and sees an eyelash on the page-his or mine, what difference? I know him: he will say it's mine, a part of me lost, now sheltered in this house of words he has spent the day framing.
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