Tar-dark world. The defining color is black, the inky night of her nocturnal hunts and the deep, bottomless dark of her alien retreat.

A watcher of men, she is everything and nothing. She might be too much of something, or too little of something else. Time will sort out the particulars.

There are no simple entry points – she demands engagement, and to be taken as a whole. Her discomfort is over her own allure, her undisturbed surface. It’s more about intuition and gesture than dialogue. They remain as echoes. They’ve made her beautiful in a real way, with hips and blemishes and dimples in her skin.

The imprint of the lives she begins to grapple with as her time on Earth extends, leads her to stop seeing herself as a mere conduit for her mission, and to start developing a sense of subjectivity.

Her life force is overlapping, shaping itself into a pattern of rings that simultaneously suggests a birth canal dilating, the stages of a rocket separating, and a lunar eclipse as seen through a telescope’s lens.

She's a life-form you can’t quite understand, but it’s carrying on relentlessly, like a beehive, moving backward through the constellations at first approach.

o soft lantern, teach me
how to gleam
in spite of petty falcons.

within the solitude of the dreadful span
of the blackened and bowed sky
the deep withered grass bends in the moonless dark
quieting the cold and murmuring earth

hushing her into fitful sleep

the air is hard
and the wind lacerates the night
razor incisions left behind
in the icy flesh of obsidian hours

open wounds howl like wolves
on the trail of prey in flight

I hunger for you
under the restless stars

Gold seeps like marrow,
stars bruise against the void.
"Light is starving," he mutters,
"even the sun feasts on its own fire."

Frost exhales—
a slow, deliberate frostbite.
"Light is a path,"he murmurs,
"but men mistake fire for direction—"
"they burn chasing it."

Emily lingers, a moth in lace,
wings dusted in ruin.
"And yet, all paths end the same—"
"a mouthful of quiet, a bed of hush."

Vincent laughs—ochre-stained teeth,
lips split with fevered art.
"Silence is blue," he whispers,
"a drowning, gasping blue—"
"the color of voices suffocated in paint."

Ruskin presses a palm to the glass,
watching years soften like ink in water.
"No, silence is the color of old hills—"
"of books breathing dust in rooms left untouched."

Emily smirks.
"Ah, but death is an artist too—"
"it sketches men into whispers, steals them like dust in light."

Vincent exhales, trembling.
"Then let it take me in color."
"Let me vanish in thick strokes—"
"golden, breathless, eternal."

Frost watches shadows stretch long.
"Some men vanish in quieter ways—"
"no fire, no frenzy—just the hush of winter."

Ruskin traces ivy creeping over forgotten doors.
"Some men vanish like abandoned houses—"
"sinking soft into time’s arms."

Emily tilts her head, voice a half-buried secret.
"Perhaps eternity is not silence—"
"but the echo of a name no one dares to speak."

Time draws close for dispersal.

Coming summer there'll be no traces
of the faces beaming at the gate.

Eyes sparkling lips apart
breaking into one more dance
to be in the sunlight under sky.

Hugs and kisses fly in the wind
maybe one last embrace
for all time to come.

They'll see the world differently
and their paths will never meet,
most likely.

The most intimate will become strangers
before once more
they disperse at the gate.

I turn back with the weight of this memory.