Thursday, November 16, 2017

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