Crayons
Let us choose our words like a child chooses crayons, calling them by their names of apricot, instead of what we see, orange. Let us peel off their paper coats and draw sailboats in the inner wool, so now we can roll them against the pages we tore from the backs of books, making wide inundations of color that mushroom across the page, so that we forget that the rivers we created were once only a stiff rivulet between a child’s fingers. Let us choose our words like a child chooses crayons, as fastidiously as Renoir dismissed his brushstrokes from his hand to the swathe of canvas as vast and ballooning, liberated and pregnable as the tract of a whale’s belly. Let us choose our words like a non-native speaker, who dares not call a fountain a toilet, and takes care in plucking words like searching for and paying full price for unbruised pears. Let us choose our words like a crayon, a Renoir brushstroke, an unbruised pear, and pay full pri