The following poem is a response to Country Living by Junior Creative Writing student, Meghan Carroll. She wrote it as part of an assignment for Prof. Shara McCallum’s English 204 Creative Writing: Poetry class.
If I Could Paint
-By Meghan Carroll
If I could paint
I would do white and blue,
like the sky,
with tall grasses slipped, singing
yellowness yellowness
wined like oil (smooth, soft, slippery);
with the clocks of my fingers dripping,
flowering when pressed like:
sustenance from skin.
And then a star—
large, rusted,
a woman’s dead body or:
a she-Christ after sex.
If I could paint
it would be something pastoral,
but utopia visceral—
silked and wintered,
slept, swept, and broken,
something beyond water,
the salt of tears—
the half-mile between blooded pumps,
soft, hearted breathing,
the space beneath eyelids,
tapped fingertips,
and held-hips—
the white-clipped distance
between every closeness,
pillowed-out effluvium of feeling,
something only ever tasted,
and only once—
If I could paint
it would be
graspedness—
light, calm, frustrated preciousness
of the unknown.