drawing class

I majored in art;
that life drawing class
I took was a revelation. I defy
you to take that class
with that professor, those
classmates and those models
and not wake up bare weeks into it

to how beautiful
human being is
physically.

Because
you will be
sitting there halfway
through a session, and you will
have lavished and worked and pored
over the drawing on your board.
Half the time drawing upon it
furiously, sometimes with
the eraser, the other half
drawing blind almost,
in dim glimpse by lower periphery,
looking up and away
to your subject,
who is by no means
an object. And then the professor

over your shoulder. “That’s beautiful.”

And you look down,
taken aback.

It’s beautiful.
The textures,
the values,
the volumes,
the shadow,
the lines picking out spare frame
and tender sags, the
defeated posture half-sprawled,
half-risen to look for hope, or
death. Yet

the one person who walked in
that day, and stripped off
was never your idea of beautiful,
then. Or whatever
your idea of beautiful was
at the beginning of the semester
- though several earlier models

sure were!

(The models for this class ran
the gamut; an important part
of the lesson, I think.) But the drawing

is beautiful.
You were working so intently,
so hard on it in the small time
you had - couple hours?

Ninety minutes? You didn’t see.
You raise your eyes and look,
and see.

Maybe for the first time in your life.

How beautiful is one single human being
right there in front of you.

If you’d notice. Beautiful
in vulnerability. In hope, in fear. In attitude
and posture, and every way they hold themselves
can be beauty. Or in how else
they may hold themselves: the anger
and distrust,
suspicion they flash
across face and arms, the threat
of harm - here can be much
to find ugly. It is in

how we hold ourselves, often
in reaction to how others have held
or hold us, or we think they do.

But so too can beauty be,
from the same source. Beauty

is not in the eye, but in the hold. Of the beholder
and the beheld both. It is in
and between how we hold
ourselves.

In the appearance itself, at rest
and unmoved? There is even there
much to move you, but

there is noting at all to conclude.
So nothing to judge.