House of
Blues
You live for these songs you
inhabit
time and time over:
In them you uncover
nerve endings of truth, distil the essence
of longing and loss –
They fit you like old shoes, a favourite
jacket.
Like broken butterflies they visit
through cracks in windows
and shut doors.
You cradle a guitar, your body sways
with the melody.
In your voice the miles
of distances travelled,
the warm contours and frayed edges
of the places your heart has been.
***
Now and again I strike a match in the dark
and scratch the surface of longing.
***
To be steady in one’s work,
and patient as a sail
that waits for the wind to fill it.
***
Birds stitch the morning into being with their
song.
“View
from My Window at Dawn”
The darkness lifts, becomes something lighter.
From her window
she watches the light, now only
a shift, a paler patch of sky,
trace the beginnings of the day.
Lights go on in windows, while others stay
dark.
A brushstroke light or firm –
colours and textures revealing a city
half unveiled,
suspended between sleep and waking.
She paints quickly.
A desire insistent, frustrating, to render all
of it
truthfully, as it is.
A lightness, gladness in her heart –
converge
in this silence, alone at dawn.
This blue-and-grey-tinged world, she knows,
will soon
disappear, give way to a harsher light;
to the traffic and noise
of the street below.
But as it is lost, begins
to fade away, she sees that some of it, at
last,
is there now:
a threshold place of light and dark,
of lights in windows, of chimneys and rooftops,
and far off buildings;
and of a light which, like the sky,
seeps through by degrees
from the window, porous, wet still,
of the canvas.
***
Now, if only for this moment,
no other world exists
save for the one she conjures
in this lamp-lit room.
***
Figure in a painting –
she emerges
from the canvas,
tells the painter
of her dreams.
- Eduard Burle
