When She Left

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.