The Pallet

Somewhere in this room a late prose

sleeps, still moist, like tempera

thickening on a pallet,

not wanting to contain

itself to the canvas, in part

its own enemy, sleeping like a sheet

Or beneath a sheet

of unreadable prose

that seems not to conform to the lips, breaking apart

as soon as you speak it, caked with tempera

when it should be a thin bed, one just wide enough to contain

you, a pallet

Shall we say, in a small range of colors (a pallet

with a worn gray sheet

for sleeping) that contain

and erase each other back to the prose

when all was clean, real and tubes of golden tempera

were shipped to your door, when the part

meant the whole, not the part.

(Then you worked, applying gold leaf with your pallet,

using cratefuls of tempera

to make masterpieces, wrapping them in yellow sheets

of tissue, dictating prose

in the evenings before sleep, unable to contain

your joy.) But now you contain

each word, extract the part

that is jeweled, level your prose

to a platform, a pallet

after a fashion, and keep most of the sheet

blank, as if tempera

no longer existed (at least the tempera

that Ingres used so well). Most words contain

too much, they pull the sheet

from a circumspect phrase and dazzle the part.

I’m thinking of a wooden, paddle-like tool, a—

Don’t say it, let it sleep, that kind of prose

is the prose I mean, a toneless tempera,

a reduced pallet, self-contained

like a part among parts on a lyrical sheet.

©Massachussetts Review