The Wooden Palette

After a year, the oils of the pigments one has used on a good wooden palette have penetrated the palette so that one wipe of the cloth can make it clean. But the palette remembers. The oils are within, and some stains on top are permanent. Some of the writing I live with is that. Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. Yeats’s Purgatory. Macdara Woods’ letter to me about Sunset Boulevard. Pentimento has something to do with it. Oil and wood, which are my siblings –Saint Francis stopped too soon – have something to do with it. The painting is there. But I am the palette.