Impasto

Blank white canvas with no expectations
Smooth cloth grain, thirsty to absorb pigment
Catching light and reflecting back all, indiscriminately

Dip a putty knife into a pool of pigment, thick like butter
Feel the oil resist separation, resentful of being disturbed
Gleaming utensil splashed with color, like blood or sky

Mar the blankness there, violate it with color
Leave scraped marks across its borders, violent mountains
Tapered off into thin glaciers and then streams, white underpinned

Not one artist, but many, beginning with mother, sole face
Father adds to it, followed by many others, all with their pigments
Portraiture ever fluid, never drying, the end result yet to be seen

Love adds soft colors and textures, to contrast with despair
Hope adds chiaroscuro, colors revealing their underlying light
Happiness adds the exuberance of impasto, joyous dimensions

Careless artists will bleed the colors, run them with bad tools
Ill intent will try to undo the good work done by others, scraping
Bad faith dripping down the canvas like turpentine, irreversible solvent

Yet the work emerges as it will, the many artists adding and subtracting
Till the canvas becomes its work, laden with the efforts of the artists and
It is hung on a light wall, memories for other artists and canvases to come.