Crayons
gerald burns
Everyone is giving up crayons.
The Chinese have put lead in them.
Do their own children color with
brush only? Must ours, chewing
idly on Periwinkle, lay up in the marrow
illnesses like arsenates? No one thinks
it deliberate. Most whites are poison.
If you paint, Payne’s and Davie’s Gray
fraction out to sooty brown, pale blue
some colas “warm,” some “cool” most
interesting on the level of blacks in a cloak,
translating color from local tinge to sculptural.
Children given pumpkins to draw pick the
orange crayon nearly every time, rub-rub
with spaces left (a not) for eyes, mouth.
It’s never satisfactory, pitted construction
paper taking on this sheen, so unlike in
tone, intent, to litho crayon on a stone
Lautrec would mix the inks for, Lole Fuller
some transparent but never Disney butterfly
flecked with -- look! -- gold paint, even that
like some Turner actually rendering pinkish-mauve
sunsets, or Church’s icebergs salmon-green.
The child imposes, Iridian imperialist
“brown” on the turkey, “red” for apple, the s
objects like the colors twice removed
from any reality or handling. How did
Spielberg actually get that lovely brown
for Tinker Bell, Franciscans covetous?
Those who read Romaunt of the
Rose in medieval times imagined
colored flowers as like virtue, vice.
The color made of wax is always dark.
Even the white sullies. Who, looking at
thick-printed quarters scribbled on
with silver imagined its decay of value
as if your dog achieving as you dreamed
speech displays a lower-class accent.
The crayon taught us why we couldn’t draw.
Still, pounded into pegboard holes
or that wonderful toy, its colored cylinders
rounded at the edges nearly into cubes
we’d pound into the table thwarted cause,
red in, blue out created unexpected color
you might call solid. You’d chew
on a broken crayon, always surprised the
musty taste, petroleum distillate, was so
unlike the color tinted labels named.
