Imagined Interiors

Tonight we spoke like a frequency graph,
Like a landscape without edges,
Extruded strokes of light to my lips like fingers
stretching through the architecture of your words.
To cocoon the sounds in my ear longer

I scavenge images to furnish this room
that holds you in sprawling pieces
with feathered edges that overlap and repel.
I smear the walls with my tender vision.

This passage doesn’t permit complexity.
A blocked aperture half-closed
the debris left by a fragment fallen
from the frozen eye of the storm.
It obstructs my view of your dislocation.

Someone coughs in the background.
Your voice lowers to a soft tendril,
I hear your body turn in your sheets
As you describe the darkness
that stares back at you.

In these implicit movements I accrue
the inescapable graduation of weightless light
that reaches from me to you under a heavy winter.

Colour will slide in the morning
over the outline of your refuge.
(like an unfinished house)
Like music climbs through those sounds.

The Blinding of Samson

Rembrandt’s careful eyes didn’t betray him
Like he’d always feared in time they would

His painted fascination, drowning pools of umber
With flashes of thin splashed mink-haired white

Mouth, ears, hands, high foreheads, soft necks
All sensed through shared visions of a master

For all but imagined Tobias and his blind father
Healed by smeared fish bile at Raphael’s advice

Tobias’ kind eyes soft muted by pigment’s taboos
That captive guide to the painter’s forfeiture

Witness to his father’s eyesight’s dim demise, he
tinged all his gradients a finely disguised crimson

Hinting at his own corporeality ebbing between
the tint of dark undulations, well lit then lost

This impenetrable darkness of engulfed visions
rendered in such minute detail, sight’s empathy

Each fleshy hue pulled taut to contain a meaning
Lucid skin immersed in a porous wash of stories

All strengths have secret flaws softly concealed
Love’s invisible tug distorting senses like disease

Brightest skies in a defiantly blinding blue a
colossal revolt to Samson’s wide-eyed betrayal

By Delilah’s gaping gaze consumed by wiles, then
A self portrait of shadows pulled across heavy lids

Such accentuation in history’s obscured frailties by
A painter haunted by blind violinists and beggars

Nothing on canvas trembles like that thin fear
Drowned in the infinities of Rembrandt’s shadows

Characters loosely clothed in fabrics detailed creases
Lonely souls exposed without drawing crude realism

The tiny folds of skin grown over his Mother’s eyes
Seen with the forensic precision of delicate prophecy

Blackness growing faster silently as Samson’s hair
Too slowly to gain sought salvation without ridicule

A whispered alert to the spectator’s engaged gaze
Awake to the act of looking where light ends

A clarity recorded in endless perceptions framings
Of a man’s fear governed by his father’s losses

Behind Teeth

In the space which hangs
like a slack rope,
between two thoughts.
You find an inroad,
again.
Armature broken.
Debris spun.
You flop,
you kneel
before me,
As I sit,
a brittle caricature.

I had come,
to leave.

Hidden constants
cocooned.
My resolve buckled.
I try to hold you.
My arms derail,
Encircle myself,
instead.
I am a coil.
A pillar.
A self-antagonistic stack.

Decaying bleak,
before your scavenger hands.
You’ve waited,
blanched
for me,
to be bleached,
by this blinding white
of your secrets,
in shrill circles.
I squint to see,
your raptors cut their throats.
To find no flower’s hearts.

The Right Moment

Can I reveal to you my gestures
through this writing.

I want to show you my hand,
As it rests now in my lap,
Fingers softly curled,
Upturned like a cup.

As the other makes these shapes
Which I will later tap tap type
with two stiff fingers.

Read them now and retrace
That path of meaning, back
through keypad, paper, pen
hands, lap, arms

Back to the point
of its conception

Back to this moment
Which was right.

We can adjust the rest
Later.