trying to avoid sleep because my dreams sometimes terrified me i opened up the leather-bound artbook my uncle had brought back from his most recent excursion to europe and presented to me (i was eight, it was september, “america can be so cruel” he used to say to my mother, being gay and open about it, he believed any nephew of his should also see the world thru the eyes of an artist and a dutchman, in this case vermeer);
but i was not ready for vermeer or the onrushing shame that spread like a warm yellow stain (“a boy afraid of his own dreams” laughed my father, he could not admit the presence of fear in the natural world never mind a son of his!) and there was a brueghel in the basement my father had hung it there and me in my trembling pajamas and winter coming on with its creaking furnace and aching hardwood floorboards and the wall clock ticking time away;
fear seemed entirely natural to me in those bleak and solitary hours of youth and abandonment (though i could see my mother thru the dining room dark wide as the continent that separated my bedroom from the companionship I both loathed and craved) and she was probably trying to glue some broken blue delft teacup my uncle had given her back together,
or maybe she was reading some tattered library magazine, practical suggestions a woman of the 1950s might use to make a perfect home even more perfect, and i was certain she could not hear me but i was wrong;
my perfectly imperfect american mother! bathed in european light, like vermeer!
and night’s long shadows advancing on everyone in the house, including her, including me.
