More Poems by Cecelia Night Vision Spinning Wheels Wish Song for the End of May Without The Visitors Passage More About Cecelia

Cecelia Hagen Drawing Lesson A step toward loss, no colors. The glass, the leaves, the branches -- all gray. These are your words, your few words. It's a diminishment, a necessary lesson you try to view as a choice, a humble garden, an arrangemnt of shades. The butterfly of pleasure now a moth, an accurate line, a plane possessing its proper shade. You look and look, your hand disobeys, but sometimes the pencil gets it right. What you need to learn: To get by with less, to represent in a new way. Represent, as if to catch the present by evaporating into it. I was here, say the strokes of graphite. Your tools are simple so you will not be distracted by anything but the stick that is set before you -- the stick and its bent, beautiful shadow.