he was a painter once- in the sense of a duck, waddling augustly chin up mild fingers engraved with acrylic rice paddy mosaics
his deft strokes, steady against barn yard hum dry ruby in watery crevices, between the skullcap and cerebellum, between ages of semantics
his cast net he stirs the mud-clodded ponds and rasps, cane cracking leather, I clasp on the waterlogged eyes out the window airborne for some lost jungle to salvage some sliver of a canvas
he turns to me on the wooden planks and hand in hand we plummet into an abyss of our own creation