Miniatures — Rachel Dacus

Miniatures
His teeth are ground square and tinted red
from paan-chewing, the custom in his village.
The master painter with a one-hair brush
keeps a suffocatingly hot shop. I fan myself
and he leaps to switch on the electricity,
explaining that he works in noon sun
to grind minerals into colors for paint.
Fire seems to be his medium,
and it darkened him as he bent over copies
of old paintings. He daubs with earth and sun,
this chocolate man, reviving small, flat people
in lapis, amber and malachite—people who are pink, 
blue and astonished. Their bookplate-sized scenes 
on silk look like every miniature until 
you notice the hairs in an elephant’s ear,
the gleam of the diamond on the emperor’s ring
as his hand rests on a concubine’s bare thigh.
Their entire Moghul palace would fit
into a deck of cards—cards whose shuffle and cut
describe the luck of the painter’s father 
when he bid his life savings on an antique book
at auction and won for his sons a living—to thrive
by reproducing in oven heat their gemlike 
ancestors with hair-fine fidelity.

Aurangabad, India