I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
For instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink, we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters. “It was too much,” Mike says.
But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how…
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Leonard Durso 
I’ve never come across this but like the spirit very much.
I too wish I could paint.
Glad you liked it.
It’s a really subtle piece of writing, isn’t it? Purporting to be about painting, it’s really about poetry, and in praising how a painting (or poem) can step sideways and leave its subject out of frame, he does exactly that in these lines! (I however, lacking such subtlety, have done the very opposite here … )
But your comment is right on the money, as they say. Thank you.
I have read this countless times over the years. To me it is a constant reminder that I am not.. what I am.
It is a poem I come back to often myself.