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Chiaroscuro
going to see Rembrandt—no, it wasn’t night but we spoke inside your twice averted words, where people crowded my thinking, the names, the colors drained out of them like the living tissue of blood. Their bodies, in warehouses, attics, sheds, sit on steps, pose in corners, prone against the edges. Elaborate frames measured empty places on the brocade wall where two Rembrandts were stolen years ago. We stared at the memory of seeing, our eyes drawn to light. The Self-Portrait the thieves left—you couldn’t take your eyes from his, unbreakable link, how we see people move through their lives. What our minds do with light and full dark: his face, suffused with the flush of mourning, seemed to radiate on its own. I see your face, a single self-portrait you carry, your eye’s arc, your forehead, a perfect curve into roundness, bright on a background that drowns in shadow but keeps some detail. I can’t see your face is luminous unless everything around it is obscured.
Everything she says will be there, already in him. As he listens, she watches a billion lamps gleam in ravines of his brain. He whispers an answer, sh, no other sound. Not th that ends breath, next to nothing. But sh, loudest noise from the softest range. She feels air’s friction.
where people gesture themselves to cramped poses. They forget their bodies into someone with the same eye or stooped back. They slip into a dark booth at the diner, one head turned toward the exit sign. A woman’s moving mouth over the general din, the vibrating walls, the back door open on an alley where the cook in a white apron leans against a brick wall, smokes a cigarette. His breath drives the low rolling rattles into answers that return by ear. Hanging inside and just outside him, his own blurted sound.
In Posse:
Potentially, might be ... |
