just mercedes

she doesn't trust colours
since she learned they can't exist
independently

now she finds this spring display
distasteful

like stale perfume
in a ball gown

fretful she strikes
random piano keys

in time with quivering shadows
falling from unseen world
across the library carpet's
faded pattern

fade
shade
stale
jade

almost she wants to ...

that apple

glowing in the blue glass dish

vibrant in its is-ness



sacred to Apollo

font of Avalon



offers itself

from the first garden

sweet as knowledge

bitter as wisdom



from Iduna's box

food to keep gods

forever young

or food for the dead



...

returning home to find, of
course, it's moved elsewhere
in the meantime
maybe back over
seas that brought them
here
last century
or the one before - grey mists
gather in cracks of time
thyme colonises land where
rushes once grew rampant

in an aunt's album
never before shown
a century-old photo
of a cloak-swathed Maori woman
outside a raupo hut
noted 'grandma'

no ...

black crows call me from sentient sky
ripe wheat awaits the autumn blade
to live forever, first I must die

hues of bright immortality lie
in sunshine mortals never made
black crows call me from sentient sky

loving you is a treacherous tie
that binds me fast in sacred glade
to live forever, first I must die

madness lies in your soft velvet sigh
like siren, singing from the shade
black crows call me ...

twenty one
black birds
fly

in a sentient sky
over fields
of ripening wheat

where the path
turns from view


disappears




written from van Gogh's painting of the same name, the last he painted before shooting himself.