Thrall

—Juan de Pareja, 1670   He was not my father though              he might have been I came to him the mulatto son of a slave woman just that as if     it took only my mother to make me a mulatto meaning any white man could be my father   ✶   In his shop        bound to the muller I ground his colors my hands dusted        black with fired bone               stained blue        and flecked with glass           my nails edged vermilion                      as if my fingertips bled In this way        just as I’d turned the pages of his books I meant to touch everything he did   ✶   With Velázquez               in Rome a divination At market        I lingered to touch the bright hulls of lemons closed my eyes until the scent was oil and thinner        yellow ocher in my head And once the sudden taste of iron a glimpse of red so rich it was holy the robes of the pope at portrait that bright shade of blood before it darkens purpling nearly to black   ✶   Because he said painting was not labor                 was the province    of free men I could only watch               Such beauty in the work of his hands his quick strokes a divine language I learned over his shoulder my own hands tracing the air in his wake Forbidden to answer in paint I kept my canvases        secret hidden until Velázquez decreed unto me my self               Free I was apprentice            he my master still   ✶   How intently               at times could he fix his keen eye upon me though only once did he fix me in paint            my color a study             my eyes wide as I faced him a lace collar at my shoulders as though I’d been born noble the yoke of my birth gone from my neck In his hand        a long brush to keep him far from the canvas far from it        as I was the distance between us doubled so he could observe me twice               stand closer to what he made For years         I looked to it as one looks into a mirror   ✶   And so in The Calling of St.