WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2012
Ekphrasis Blue
1. We are enamored with ruin. Our secret and ecstatic wish: let it all fall down. 2. My favorite time of day is dusk, when the sky burns, the sun riding the horizon. I wish I could walk behind myself and look up the hill at the golden lens flare bursting through until I am nothing but one of those black silhouettes that I saw in your photos. The ones on the cave walls. 3. I long for consorted shadows, splashed from the sun. At dusk, we would walk together and watch Helios pull the sun down, light pouring down our mouths and navels. 4. It’s the inhale before the night, dusk. And it’s when I inhale again do I realize that no gulp or gust of air can fill the void you left, when you left. 5. He was, and maybe remains, the jeweled-eyed one amongst stones. Dark hair and desert skin. 6. His bed was blue beneath the dark clouds, beneath our embraces. The water, the wind, the land—the very tempest gave itself to us. But he, but you, fell into the crush and out of the billowing eye. You couldn’t withstand the pressure of the night. 7. An ekphrasis is a description of a work of art that depicts a person, place, or event.This is my ekphrasis of the desert skinned jewel, my ekphrasis blue. 8. A month or so ago, I was turning down a path on the trails that I run and I saw a large, grey vulture swoop itself onto a branch of a fallen tree. I stopped running and stared. It surveyed the area and then paused when it saw me. For a brief moment, we stared at each other, into each other. It tilted its ugly bald head when I slowly bent down to snatch a stick, and as the stick was in mid-air the vulture was already flying away, the beat of its wings like the exhale of a larger predator. 9. You ran just to fall, steep and low—and I ran for the golden rays of dusk. If only there was a collision. 9