The portrait you might have made of me:

Hard-put to stay still on two legs, precarious-balanced, always off-center, making a third leg striding about or leaning arms and shoulders, and supporting that with centipede-legged conversation, I’m not an easy subject, straining to get off your canvas. There’s so much of me on the outside, but I’ll let you disentangle me bit by bit from the dark material I keep trying to fill with light and thread me back into my eyes. A pot or two of coffee, a sturdy chair, a quiet dark glance – you know your business. There’s a silence here, surrounded by flames of that thing between desire and fear, and I’ll lead you in a merry treasure hunt for it, drawing alchemical symbols in the air, incanting Auden and Whitman and Baudelaire, drumming my fingers in star-rhythms, naming critters faster than Adam. You see past these diagrams, these things, you point your bow at that single, perfect moment you were born with, and are cursed to never know in yourself, surrounded by jealous naiads and the dark attentions of the infinitely hungry gods. Diana, when you are there, past the flames, have mercy on me.