YESTERDAY'S WOMAN

YESterday's  Woman

Yesterday, a man,

a gray-haired man,

cohabitating within an old man’s body rolls in. He

flaunts a Parisian beret fairing a pin of three gold stars 

thrusting up the side of his head.

A man, a thin man, with artist hands, and wire hair

sprouting out from beneath the soft black felt. He sits down.

This man, who I ate a pasta dinner with

yesterday said,

he just wants to paint the perfect unplanned portrait.

This man, with two languid burgundy tubes acting as animated legs stares at me,

and as if out or nowhere says, “As you sit there in that straight back chair,

just as you sit with your hand under your chin--

I would not change a thing about you. No I wouldn’t.

I would paint an impromptu portrait of you, highlighting the red tint in your hair and

capturing the cobalt of your eyes.”

I smile and reply.   “How much is the portrait in the living room?

The one of...

the beautiful young Asian woman lounging on the velvet chaise in the afternoon sun?”

He spoke slowly after sipping red wine. “At a gallery ten thousand, for you I will do half.”

I decline.

I ask him if he was ever married. The golden sign was mockingly absent. 

I don’t know why that question was important.  I gaze at the women’s portraits

hung on spare nails around the mock gallery porch dining room.

He hums with conceit in his breath.

“Three wives- not one lasted. Each woman plateaued.”

His long crooked fingers parted the air between us.

“They each left. Actually I’d say I left them.

 I was bored. They didn’t want to grow anymore.”

 In half his life he is a portrait painter; in the other, he is

a vacuum repair man as his trade for a living.

“I want to paint portraits.”  He says as he lights a joint.

“I want to paint the perfect unplanned portrait.”

His smoky breath exhales to blow out the burning match caught between his finger tips.  

I believe he wants to paint women--

a woman with luxuriously tussled hair, a porcelain face of grace,

the kind of woman you want to kiss, who’s eyes want to kiss you.

The kind of woman that makes you need to

put your parting lips directly onto a taut canvas.

I wonder if the crimson lips he paints might just feel real.

Maybe he can make an unplanned portrait real. Make a real woman real.

I shake my head yes and say to the artist, yes I understand.

TJKG

dverse -- more poetry to please