When the Easel Burned

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

When I build a fire, I do it the way I’ve done most things—
quietly,
purposefully,
without asking anyone’s permission.
Not to warm the house—it’s too damn hot for that—
but to cleanse it.
To strip it of what still reeks of him.

I unbolt the joints of the thing he left behind,
his old easel, thick with years of paint and pride,
crafted from narra, maybe tanguile,
the kind of wood you can’t kill quickly.
Colonial, solid, stubborn—
like his silence
when I finally said,
“This is who I am.”

And I stack the pieces just right,
angled for breath and burn.
He taught me that.
Not in words,
but in the way he lit things and left.

Then, by firelight,
I see what I’ve done.
I am burning the last of him.
The easel he used when I posed for him
at twenty-two, all cheekbones and borrowed courage,
the boy he called muse
when he still thought I could be reshaped.
He said my softness was tragic.
I thought his hardness was love.

For months I sat for him,
naked but not free,
learning how to disappear in plain sight.
He painted me into a man
he could stomach in public,
toned down, angled up,
never too much.

What if someone had told me,
back then,
“If you quit now—if you play the part,
the obedient shadow, the half-you—
he might stay.”
What would I have said?

I didn’t even have an art back then.
Not really.
Just this body
that never fit his frame.

But the fire fits everything.
Even narra yields,
given time.

So it burns—his easel—
with the quiet dignity of a thing
that finally understands its purpose
was never to hold the image,
but to be consumed by truth.

He thought he left it behind
as a gesture, a gift.
But like most gifts from men like him,
it came with a condition:
stay smaller than him.

And yet—look at it now.
Listen to it crack.
The molave groans.
The flames dance, not like lovers,
but like survivors.

I don’t miss him.
I miss the boy who waited for him.
The boy who curled into the corners of someone else’s genius
just to be seen.

But tonight—
tonight I watch it burn.
And in the smoke,
I see the outlines of someone else:
not a muse, not a model,
but a man
who chose to rise
outside the painting.