She
spent her last days
in
a foreign hallway
her
house, her home, her monument
an
empty eggshell
her
light a maze of
shifting,
muted forms
And
yet she was there
she
always was
she
always will be
When
the daylight left
on
an early springtime day
it
simply slipped off
toward
other places
to
other times, other ways
of
seeing and feeling things
Leaving
us behind, without ever
understanding
what all meanings
might
lie within the picture
A
painting never fully painted
for
the lack of a perfect
brush,
for the want of
all
the oils and chalk and
charcoals
and sweat and blood
simply
given away
A
drawing etched in memory
complete
only as far as
the
heart can reach
Hers
was a life of eyesight
felt
through the heart,
reaching
into places we
were
all meant to share
but
too few of us –
for
some reason
She
‘could never begin
to understand’ –
ever
looked
Every
word we ever heard
every
thought we ever had
was
shaped through the
prism
of her eyes
and
their love of light
and life and birds and…
And
everything we never quite
understood,
yet knew
we
had to search for
She
became herself only through us
the
way it should be
leaving
behind this sweetest
measure
of our failure:
our
inability to be as good
as
she never thought she was
And
then the sadness of it
those
eyes that cherished sunlight
cruelly going blind
Until
at last she wandered off
through
shades of darkness lit only
by the flickering reflections of a candle
and
I awakened, confused, to the warmth
of
an Easter morning sun stretched
across
the back of a tired neck
Suggesting
something missing
from
a focus slightly shifted
toward
some far and distant place
A
little girl who grew
and
drew and gave as if
she
never owned, a lifetime left
in
sketches fading into a stubborn
walk
down that last long and
lonely
darkened hallway
A
light still burning so very brightly
as
it always has
as
it always will.
