Passing Through
The city recedes, and in the dim hush of the bookshop, she stands—
a shadow among shelves, folded inward,
something bent in her shoulders, a shape recognized but unacknowledged.
Once, she had said nothing but told everything—
the stagger in her step, the new weight in her limbs,
the way she lingered at the edge of the studio light,
no longer the form he had wanted to capture.
He watches now, tracing absences—
the ***** of her shoulders once held tension, a poise
that suggested movement even in stillness.
Now she carries herself differently,
the lines of her frame settling rather than waiting,
her presence less an idea, more a fact.
Once, she was all gold-lit angles,
the right lines, the hush of reflected glow—
a frequent hire, the form desired,
an artifact of someone else’s vision.
She had belonged to the eye before she had belonged to herself—
posed into being by hands that never touched her,
rendered in strokes that softened what was sharp,
every detail adjusted to fit a world not her own.
She had been borrowed from that illusion,
but had never been made to stay.
But too often seen, too often known,
a form rehearsed until it dulled,
the lines that once shimmered with possibility
grew fixed, predictable.
No longer his vision, only a presence—
no longer his invocation, only a fact.
Now she moves with a tired grace,
her skin softer, edges blurred,
a body gone through motherhood, through ruin, life—
the exact silhouette that he will never sketch again.
She does not see him watching.
She does not recognize the shadow he has become.
She steps out through one door. He chooses another.
Two figures, moving apart,
the way a vision unspools,
the way a muse disappears.
He does not linger, does not reconsider—
what was once luminous has dimmed,
what was once rare is now merely seen.
Yet what is art if not the wreckage and the salvage—
the ruin and the radiance, the lifted and the fallen,
the flawed, the irredeemable and the redeemed?
He will not ask. He will not answer.
And so, what he creates will never hold her.
