At the age of four I roamed
around my house with no shirt,
my mother was not yet twenty-four,
and I lived on a green plastic chair
with an unbalanced leg.
I bent over the dark wood
of a now-firewood-desktop for hours
and laid waste to eight-pack
upon eight-pack of Crayolas.
My mother implored me to color sparingly,
but kept buying them. She knew
I drew pictures that said things.
Six well-placed lines—a house.
Six stick-figures—my family.
I drew my mother's dress wide
in the name of realism.
I took my art and delivered it
door-to-door in old newspaper bags
she saved from rainy days.

Sometimes, I knew she was behind me,
observing my sporadic scribbles and occasional
eruptions of solid shape.
I drew her standing in guarded silence—
white paper, a stick figure, arms folded, no mouth.
There was an art to the scene,
an emotion that demanded preservation.
I think it was a mixture of love
and fear that her presence might destroy a universe.
As she did one morning,
asking why I was not ready for pre-school.
She held one of my sisters in each arm,
the youngest with a fuming diaper,
the other yanking her surrendered hair.
I told her I no longer needed school,
I was going to be an artist.
That was fine with her, and she
sent me to Kindergarten next September.

I no longer draw stick figures.
They've been running their course
of exponential decay since my mother replaced
crayons with a weekly exodus to the library.
My art is words—a house,
not six lines but five letters.
My family—eight names
meaning nothing except to us.

My art is the art of shortcuts.
My mother—an adjective, noun, and indefinite article.
A kind woman, a loving woman,
a still not-so-skinny woman.

A young woman who nearly tossed
me in a dumpster when I was a month old
and would not stop crying.
A visionary woman, who nursed my imagination
on her half-priced paperback Star Trek novels.
A tired woman, who typed my school assignments
while I snored through two a.m.
A sad woman, who asks
me on the phone what more
she can do for my seventeen year-old sister,
lounging in smoky Austin cafés,
wrestling poetry and agnosticism
with the same desperation
that once sucked my mother's breast.

A mother who crafts art too complicated
for words.