/Stag’s Leap, 2012.
the easel Salto del Ciervo / Sharon Olds / Traducción de Natalia Leiderman y Patricio Foglia
When I build a fire, I feel purposeful–– proud I can unscrew the wing nuts from off the rusted bolts, dis– assembling one of the things my ex left when he left right left. And laying its narrow, polished, maple angles across the kindling, providing for updraft–– good. Then by flame–light I see: I am burning his old easel. How can that be, after the hours and hours–all told, maybe weeks, a month of stillness–modelling for him, our first years together, odour of acrylic, stretch of treated canvas. I am burning his left–behind craft, he who was the first to turn our family, naked, into art. What if someone had told me, thirty years ago: If you give up, now, wanting to be an artist, he might love you all your life–what would I have said? I didn’t even have an art, it would come from out of our family’s life– what could I have said: nothing will stop me.
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