You have lost yourself, I think.
Or deny it, wherever you've buried you
A scared child with a hardened heart,
beaten pain into armor too thick for anything
but her blue eyes
to penetrate.

There are only small pains, now.
Paper cuts, hangnails,
sore arms from trash bags too heavy.
It is strange to be so free.
One grows used to the darkness,
the light, blinding.
I blink, my eyes dry,
I feel my pulse in my lips--
it feels strange.
I stare at the ceiling,
your memory resting on my chest,
lining the gap I want to fill,
but my hands lie empty.

Does that book still burn on your shelf?
Or have you stuffed it under your bed,
its pages torn, still smelling of cigarette smoke
with a few coffee stains.
(Mine rests next to Tolkien).

Do you flip through it once in a while?
Noting the words you marked,
once full of meaning.
Are they empty now?
(I found empty words in my copy).

Do you take care to avoid
the covert letter under the jacket flap?
Or maybe read it, and wonder
(I regret writing it.)

To my left,
there is the Neoclassical beauty,
profile drawn by David himself,
delicate,
bright eyes, reminiscent of Gainsborough.

The Rubeniste sits in front of me,
full figured, though not as colorful
as the Graces.

Behind me lurks the Rembrandt,
moody, dark,
in the chiaroscuro of a leather jacket
and tousled hair.

Here I am.
With my Schiele hands,
Rosetti lips,
but without the quiet grace
or distortion of either.

She was a child of the forest.
Birthed on a bed of moss
and swaddled in beech leaves.
Her first cries shook the trees,
as they reached branches out
to stroke new infant skin.
They coaxed her spirit into the bark
where it seeped into sap and through her veins.

He was a child of the sea
Born of the waves and rocks
placed in a cradle of sand
still wet with his mother’s blood
the sea winds stole his first breath
And cast his soul to the depths,
he would always return to the sea.

They were sun and moon lovers.
She, the daughter of golden light through leaves
He, the son of silver glints on dark waves, fleeting.
She would find him on nights of the harvest moon,
walking along the shore, stop him from running
into the sea.
He would find her at noon,
lying in the leaf mold beneath the trees
her eyes cloudy with sunlight.
He’d cover them,
afraid she would go blind.

"Ma'm,
can you remember the name of that tree?
the one with the big leaves?"
He asks me, raising a withered hand
towards the young magnolia,
not yet blooming.
"Magnolia, I believe."
A light comes into his clouded eyes.
"Ah! Magnolia! Thank you."
he says, before shuffling away.
I pause for a moment.
Staring at the sapling.
Something stirs in memory.
Something deep, or shallow,
I cannot tell.
Memory, none the less.
I feel as though I should remember
a meaning behind the white flowers,
and broad leaves,
but I draw a blank.

Touch it: it won't shrink like an eyeball,
This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear.
Here's yesterday, last year ---
Palm-spear and lily distinct as flora in the vast
Windless threadwork of a tapestry.

Flick the glass with your fingernail:
It will ping like a Chinese chime in the slightest air stir
Though nobody in there looks up or bothers to answer.
The inhabitants are light as cork,
Every one of them permanently busy.

At their feet, the sea waves bow in single file.
Never trespassing in bad temper:
Stalling in midair,
Short-reined, pawing like paradeground horses.
Overhead, the clouds sit tasseled and fancy

As Victorian cushions. This family
Of valentine faces might please a collector:
They ring true, like good china.

Elsewhere the landscape is more frank.
The light falls without letup, blindingly.

A woman is dragging her shadow in a circle
About a bald hospital saucer.
It resembles the moon, or a sheet of blank paper
And appears to have suffered a sort of private blitzkrieg.
She lives quietly

With no attachments, like a foetus in a bottle,
The obsolete house, the sea, flattened to a picture
She has one too many dimensions to enter.
Grief and anger, exorcised,
Leave her alone now.

The future is a grey seagull
Tattling in its cat-voice of departure.
Age and terror, like nurses, attend her,
And a drowned man, complaining of the great cold,
Crawls up out of the sea.