Point and Scale

Horizon line, vanishing point, convergence—
concepts first learned in perspective drawing 
from Mr. Caja, my first art teacher. I think

he was a clerk in some office during the day.
But on weekends the Belgian nuns and priests
who ran the elementary school on the hill

let him have two drafty rooms above the space 
where children took piano lessons, sometimes
getting their pancake fingers rapped 

with a pencil. Grey-haired and unassuming in his 
plain jacket and dusty slacks, yet he came to life
in that makeshift studio where on rough planks

he set out wooden cylinders, blocks, smooth
round or oval shapes. How does one learn 
to move more surely inside the outline, 

discern the source of light so shadow can be 
filled in properly? Easy to feel confused as lines
and details begin to crowd on paper, lean crooked

or badly measured. I want to figure out 
the world in small spaces, because the too-
real world is swollen if not with elegy, then 

with the detritus of memory. Constant cries, 
demanding love or time or sacrifice. And why 
is it these seem infinitely interchangeable?

But I don't pity the worm whose sights turn outward 
from the soil of its burrowing; nor envy the bird and its 
aerial view. Both think their distance from the horizon

is a kind of destiny or curse until one tries to snatch 
up the other, and the other tunnels deeper into the loam;
and all of us return to the mere but exquisite present.