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.

“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