Behind her head, a print from Japan.
Thin strokes in an age of heaviness, light
among these dark expensive furnishings.
She is white haired,
the pallet held—cautious—
over the landscape of her dress.
Now colour
can only be guessed at,
a drainage of significance
simplifying her eyes,
black and grey vanishing to white.
A bare floor. A worn rug.
A woman who has reluctantly
put longing aside, lives
in the time of last things.
A print from Japan.
Perhaps she sighed
for such imagined austerity, that sweep of line
cutting open all sight, rendering the world
sparse and proportionate, a beauty of absences.
Perhaps when alone (which is often) she dreams
of a clean white world, sliced with black and red,
where she has never been,
and a delicate, different snow.