Say you are a child. A wide black paint brush in your eager hand
set to paint a white, deep bed freezer in the backyard wash house.
The paint color, a rust-proofing, log-cabin brown.
Say you feel important. You have a Saturday afternoon task. A job to protect the freezer from the ravages of a humid balmy gulf coast—- air that dissolves metal, mildews clothes, rots interior house walls, softens books and papers.
You have seen this to be true, even though your age remains a single number.
But you are mighty with your thick, broad strokes, smothering the bubbled rust spots. You dip the brush into the bent metal edge of the paint can. Over and over. You are almost a grown-up now. The freezer looks like a massive fallen tree.
Say you turn around. Your mother stands in the doorway, hands on her hips, lips thinned in a line.
A grim silence. She says, “I wanted you to paint only the rust spots. Not the entire freezer.”
Say here is when you forget to breathe. The paint brush hovers. Paint drips down your hand
Plops on top of your scuffed tennis shoes.
But then. Say your mother’s eyes soften. Her head tilts to one side.
“I apologize,” she says. “I wasn’t clear. Good job.”
Say your mouth drops. An unfamiliar feeling rises from your feet
Coursing up skinny legs, sunburned shoulders,
your face,
your heart.
While invisible roots
secure your feet against a spinning world.
Say that in a musty, damp washhouse,
You feel you are just being born.
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