(on rushing up the stairs to see Christine)
The staircase is crippled now
but crystals still fire the walls
and the antique boxes remain,
trickling rhinestone bracelets.
The book of gnomes and magicians sleeps heavily on the shelf.
I open the door to the room you painted green.
Its floor is still made of mid-summer fern.
Its old desk and cupboards gape open,
caught in the eternal act
of an embarrassed goodbye.
The mouths of the drawers are mute.
You left behind what you loved
but did not need:
pheasant feathers
a flag from Bali
a sheep's skull
the white jaw of a weasel
and the old mirror
stained with India ink
(but focus past the smear of fingers,
the scarlet Arab handprint which wards off evil)
and there is also my time-struck face,
frozen irrevocably in this room.
Where is the clay, the wood?
Who kidnapped Fetadum and the others, the eerie faces
leering out of your indigo lands,
those masks that carved your hands,
sculpted your blunt fingers past elegance
into tools of Italian bone?
Where are the paint-stained jeans, the orange shirt,
your life's outrageous rags and hats,
the road-butchered boots that smelled,
so gloriously, of horses and sweat?
You took them all.
You walked away wearing those puppets and clothes,
your own splendid extensions of limb and soul.