Burning Down Suburbia

—an Ode to Bob Ross

When I was younger, I watched the world blend

on PBS. The painter with the Jewfro hypnotized me.

With a thumb hooked through the palette,

he painted forward from the base coat

like a god might use a blueprint.

Behind the image is always the word:

light. On top came tiny crisscross strokes

of phthalo blue. A rapturous pinwheel of words

unveiled sky. Two sharp strokes of titanium white

slashed with gray from the master's knife

became wings, gulls taking flight. I begged for nothing

but paints that summer. Already equipped -with an afro,

I sat before the paper and the cakes of color

and tried to figure out the path to cerulean,

the wrist twist to evergreens and the motion

for clouds. The oversaturated paper dried and cracked

with the fine lines of lightning. The worlds he reproduced

might as well have been Asgard or Olympus.

How I longed for a visit. Might he come

armed with a fan brush and dressed in a button down?

To be soothed by his voice and taken,

lured from the dining-room table and shown

the suburb's majesty. Look son, he might say,

at the pile of autumn leaves, the shade

on that forest-green trash bag. Using his two-inch brush

he'd blend the prefab homes on the hill

until they seemed mysterious, folded hues

of Prussian blue, Van Dyke brown, and a blaze of alizarin crimson.

Source: Rapture (Graywolf Press, 2016)