Class Exercise, with Dachsund

I haven’t found my way clear

to being an artist.

Everyone can tell

my glasses are always too clean,

no unexpected dabs

of burnt umber or crimson lake,

my hair never askew,

nothing you could call artistic, really.

I watch my dachsund running

in ear-flying loops

around my uninspired garden

that is not the garden of an artist

though he thinks it paradise enow,

and finding an alluring sea

of broken blue Italian tiles

beyond a sweep of wild oregano,

precipitates himself

into the deepest wave,

then dries himself by rolling on

the bath towel I’ve left out on the step,

with gentlemanly courtesy.

All this stirs up my urge

to pick a #2 boar’s bristle brush

out of the brushes in the coffee can

in what is not a studio, to run it

in a wriggling line

(Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent)

along the defiantly white wall

of the plain room where I’ve spent

too much of my life

teaching myself to get used to it.

—Christie