There was always a measure of translucent darkness

Around the edges of his paintings. Slim,

Elegant fissures of angelic breath shrouded

By the hooded robes of inconsolant

Tonsured monks.  Who would have overtaken the image

If it was not for his habit of

Dabbling in patterns of light that grew 

With the thickness of his brushstroke.

 

The winter’s night had been long

And arduous, as it always was

In Kristiana before the advent

Of electric lightning that made its way

Across the continent, the waters of the North Sea,

To hang uneasily on Karl Johan Street where

He would one day paint images of 

Startle-eyed pedestrians and bone-tired

Factory workers making their way across

The bridge in the late dusk of September.

 

He had been anticipating the moment

For months, although the shortened breath 

Of his childhood elongated the arc of time

Into years in the shallows of his mind.

While she waited, in vertical swathes of 

Encroaching opaqueness, at the seat 

By the window staring out

Across a sea of asparagus bushes

Swimming like feathers in a brisk wind

Reaching out towards the mansioned estate that rose

In a hill from the base of the field.

 

The air would entertain the mechanistic 

Plodding encirclement of crows as they

Rose and fell into the blanket of asparagus

Swimming into expanse of sky.

 

She would remain there, at the window

In his mind, at the edges of his unconscious.  In the language 

He would learn to speak with the apparitions 

That floated in the space between the patterns in the air

Long after the consumption took her.

 

She would bow her head to suppress a cough

Into a bloody rag, then return her gaze

To the asparagus fields.  He would wonder 

If she was longing to enjoy a more horizontal 

And expansive perspective that might be found 

On the other side of the field beyond

The pastiche of flowered tops of asparagus blossoms 

As the hill drew up to the doorway 

Of the mansion that she could only make out 

By squinting her eyes through the hovering 

Matrix of crows.

 

He would often paint the residue of her image

In portraits, in landscapes, but most admirably

In interior spaces that drew away from 

The frontal perspective of the image 

Into the darkened recesses where the thickness of the paint

Would merge into narrower brushstrokes.

 

It was not until he was walking, alone

In St. Germaine, soaked in absinthe and 

Driven to more aggressive hallucinations by gnawing hunger

That he would see patterns of regeneration

Present themselves in a way that made him 

Understand 

The waning dissimilarities between the past 

And the present, birth and death.

He would come to understand why the images 

Of his mother’s plodding descent

Into incandescence by the window 

Was more than just the abstraction 

Of his childhood memories.

 

He would continue to paint her

Reverberations that undulated

Beneath the skin of his right hand

Long after the gunshot took his middle finger.