Artists

The woman sings in her car because her husband can't abide it.

The boy wears plastic frills shaped into a mohawk on his motorcycle
helmet, even though everyone he knows says it looks stupid.

The girl gives secret names to her dogs, and to all the creatures of the
woodlands, ones she cannot tell to anyone.

The mother still calls her son a painter in public, but he's gone on to
plumbing, a family and macrame for many decades.

The father still hides his civil war pistols from his wife, kids and
friends, shines them up late at night like a mistress.

The neighborhood groans as one when the old man's snowman santa
on ropes emerges from mothballs again.

The community watches on TV how normal lives are tragedies,
then inhabit as actors their own movies.

Sometimes, the man hears his wife's voice as long-lost music, sees his
children as a yearning ballet, senses the words of his friends
as heavenly poems, feels the whole world around his house
as a painting with phosphorescent hues—but he stays quiet, not
knowing how to explain it.

One might say these people are lonely.

One might even say that the conversations the world is built around
stop with them.

But there is someone, listening, who laughs and moans and, with
sweet eyes gazing, watches the miracle of beauty
emerge from the curves they form.