Darkness fogs my February eyes.
Steel tears have leached irises to quiet mist
and etched deep tracks into soft skin.
Bird song wrenches me from nebulous Prussian nights
dissolving me into thin cerulean days
that have lost sight of their purpose.
I wake
and again the arrow pierces my brittle soul.
I bleed Rothko.
My vision blurred,
I peer sightlessly through Turner skies,
Picasso distortions.
The Starry Nights swirl and wrestle with distracted thoughts
where Goya and Munch and Dali dance with oily feet
across interminable Bruegel dreams.
I descend
as Du Champ.
There are no Waterlilies here, no Sunflowers.
Klimt’s Embrace cannot stir me.
I am Olympia stripped naked by Manet,
adrift on Géricault’s raft,
engulfed by Hokusai’s wave.
I breathe
motes of ash that carry the ephemeral scent of memories.
Literati silk washed.
I trip
on a grain of sand.
My face is sea-crest slashed.
A single strand of golden hair ensnared on a drift of wood,
refracts a memory of a glaucous gaze.
A meteor sliced the atmosphere that day,
brighter than the sun,
and shattered a glassy lake into
shards of ice.
Its heavy black heart fell deep,
sinking into
the cloying mud.
