Where were we then?
At the kiosk buying new night dreams.
At the shallow river skipping white stones too thin.
In cathedral-forest sunlight ribboning people we couldn’t be anymore.
Troubled but feigning the bravery of bird song gathering thistle before the black bear escapes winter.
But you were a painting by then—
Daffodils shifting across coalescing canvases—
A fractured melody of yellow kites and blue-star crocuses.
A spiritual notification maybe—
a dream sheathed in light.
The body always leaves itself.
The skeleton can’t always hold, you’d say.
That was after our mothers watched us from golden corridors–
Their redolence of lilac and jasmine–
their vanity tables they no longer owned.
The stars took over our city of coffee shops and too many stoplights,
turning them blue to move us vertical,
trade places in the magic of kindness—
magnified with moonglow on the sea forever blanketing ancient cities,
pharaohs and kings.
Women who bathe their feet with hibiscus and prayer for an altar of rain–
a new laziness with time.
When were we then?
In someone else’s dream bartering new memories,
emotional trampolines with bird-view of summer,
sky-view of clover—something momentarily divine.
Sitting between the sea and the buildings
He enjoyed painting the sea’s portrait.
But just as children imagine a prayer
Is merely silence, he expected his subject
To rush up the sand, and, seizing a brush,
Plaster its own portrait on the canvas.
So there was never any paint on his canvas
Until the people who lived in the buildings
Put him to work: “Try using the brush
As a means to an end. Select, for a portrait,
Something less angry and large, and more subject
To a painter’s moods, or, perhaps, to a prayer.”
How could he explain to them his prayer
That nature, not art, might usurp the canvas?
He chose his wife for a new subject,
Making her vast, like ruined buildings,
As if, forgetting itself, the portrait
Had expressed itself without a brush.
Slightly encouraged, he dipped his brush
In the sea, murmuring a heartfelt prayer:
“My soul, when I paint this next portrait
Let it be you who wrecks the canvas.”
The news spread like wildfire through the buildings:
He had gone back to the sea for his subject.
Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
Too exhausted even to lift his brush,
He provoked some artists leaning from the buildings
To malicious mirth: “We haven’t a prayer
Now, of putting ourselves on canvas,
Or getting the sea to sit for a portrait!”
Others declared it a self-portrait.
Finally all indications of a subject
Began to fade, leaving the canvas
Perfectly white. He put down the brush.
At once a howl, that was also a prayer,
Arose from the overcrowded buildings.
They tossed him, the portrait, from the tallest of the buildings;
And the sea devoured the canvas and the brush
As though his subject had decided to remain a prayer.