The Picture Manifold

There’s paint from the store
and there’s paint on the canvas.
There’s paint that gets wiped

on the painter’s clothes.
Paint that gets washed off the brush.
Paint on the palette

that dries and hardens.
There’s paint that never gets squeezed
from the tube of paint.

Paint on the canvas
is the only fucking paint
people care about

but the other paints—
new paint, unused paint, tossed paint,
the infinite paints—

are the canvas paint
extended in dimensions
we don’t always see.

The paint-on-clothing
dimension. The used-up-tube
dimension. Paint space.

Painting’s a space warp,
it’s everything, everywhere.
Paint on the canvas

is paint space collapsed
to the picture manifold.
The infinite paints

are there but unseen.
Paintings are not photographs.
That’s what painters know.