Door 2012

Bring your colored oils

for your charcoal lines

to edge them with blue

and dust them in yellow. I ask

are your bearings failing

in this blighted place?

Buttons for numbers 6 and 13

taunt in the elevator.

The space is tight, obscure

like a dumbwaiter’s closet,

riding black.

Secretly hoping she will be there;

to help this breathing along,

making this standing up right

now to be possible.

Door 2012.

I stand here after

brittle and rainless years,

trembling with key in hand,

and daunted, but I unlatch it.

The empty room is hollow,

the dresser warped under the opaque window.

A sickly, mundane, vacant painting

like a Leningrad ghost

or the iron banks of the Damvobita,

hangs as weeping fog.

I close my eyes while the emptiness

drifts around my spine like mullet shells,

the seeds gone.

She is in a red dress,

shades of tanager and crimson,

a thin muslin silk with small straps,

one fallen from the shoulder,

and black heeled shoes she’s slipping off,

a silver pin,

and her hair gently raining over lily neck.

My steps echo in the wooden space;

my bones sunken, my hands askew.

We all have all of us been chipped away at,

become a sort of detritus of wounds,

in a patchwork of holes, pleasures

routines, those silver linings,

and splintered dreams,

among all the rest.

It is these I try to paint over,

over the cracked threads, the wooden dead,

looking for the timeless, endless

rumored yellow of summer’s afternoon.

Buy here the blue shifts only

to gray and my throat digs its own

lump, a fear in the hollow.

The crimson, the golden locks, her collarbone…

They are gone.

The curtains are drawn;

their cord slack, dangling.

I tug with my hands

pull at the thick, dusty folds,

time-stained

all those dreams let slip,

those tears, our fingertips,

only to find the window dark.

My heart, my heart.

Santiago

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