The bell-boy stepped into my rented room
of elbow-brushed windows and I asked him,
Why does this hotel
smell of sunlight
so soon?
He pointed to a painting.
He said he knew.
So the rumours
of our sweat still remain,
clinging to the silvered frame
hung on this wall,
and the canvas feels like
a second skin,
Skin, I said, that was caught
on the corner of your bed,
old lover.
Skin, I repeated, that was
no longer fresh,
and I surely left it behind.
Yes,
I have seen your nakedness before,
and today once more
I feel it in these disturbed colours,
but who stands hidden
in the corner of the painting
possibly reciting songs from memory
to the red sparse tree, and making
the world believe that he
loves and exists
like the poor light
filtering in and drawing his shadow.
(He cannot be you,
because you believed in night
and miracles, only,
and your tinted glasses changed
the way you looked
at the world and me.)
And while I lean through
the frame, trying to
paralyse the night sky,
letting down my hair
like a shadow
of some fairytale,
for you,
my grey lover,
asking you to climb out over the edge
your smell stalks away into
the chalk-laden streets
far, far away from this painting
while your old whisper rings,
Girl, you said, make me violet,
like the sky in your pocket
and I will be your poem in death.
Then the bell-boy murmured
that he knew all about poetry
and he granted me
deliverance, suddenly.
I’ll take you, he said, to Bluebeard’s Room
if only you could pledge
to set free the demon of scents.
But I could only promise him
my name.
He must have agreed for soon
I let his steps roam,
as freely as his voice
till I entered the room
of blueprints and bones.
Silently,
the sea seeped in through the floor,
you crept in too, dusting chalk dust
from your clothes.
And I knew you wanted a reward
for your presence.
As the music ceased in your boundary
of blue walls, I lie down again
for I have transgressed,
and my slashed wrist must feed
the dried blood on your sheets.
Lover, I said, you must know
my skin is scarred now
and I cannot leave it behind.
