The Painter and Art Lover by Pieter Brugal the Elder
Your smoky voice,
a silent statement of stale cigarettes,
clings to curtains of currents that no longer stir between us.
It’s like those wallflower ghosts,
ethereal echoes of our fleeting youth, that drift in now and then
to jazz the floor with solo footsteps.
But the stiff dance of an age-graveled mind
grinds underfoot the grit of forgetfulness
until time,
a door-slammed memory,
once again shatters the shaded window of my heart.
And yet,
late at night, always late at night,
when the bourbon has melted all the ice
and the crystal dish overflows with ashes and stubbed cigarettes,
I confess
I hear your words in the yellow haze
as I sit lamp-lit in a circle of darkness,
even though I may never press them all
in between the pages of this unending journal,
this brown-edged recollection of an old man in a back bedroom
who, barefoot-bound and hard-of-hearing,
did not inhale enough
when you were still
a fresh breath of a soft whisper in my ear.
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