Muse

Presence. That is all. I come into your presence. As if from across the room, your silence conjures a songline, a susurration, pleasing the ear. Almost indolent atop the oaken base. You, creamed marble and veined like blue cheese. The blue veins tease your mouth, fall soft on your chin like skeins of myth and memory. And you look at me with no eyes at all, as if to say, I’ve been expecting you. Your mouth attenuated to the moment before and after the words are spoken, as if perpetually at cliff-fall, at once dreaming and waking.

(In response to the marble sculpture Muse (La Muse) by Constantin Brancusi, 1912, in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York)