Around the Clock With Red

In this world

love has no colour

yet how deeply my body

is stained by yours.

— Izumi Shikibu

I stood before a canvas yesterday stained with the blood of love. Blood red splotches of paint washed across the canvas settling in muted striations of lighter hues of the color. I believed it to be a beautiful painting. But I was the only one.

During our tour of the Hunter Museum, the guide had us sit on a bench staring up at the painting for minutes. But our tour guide had already chosen several paintings she wanted to show us, so she quickly ushered us on from that painting. Around the Clock with Red is one of several paintings that I was drawn back to later as I toured the museum alone. I saw so much in that abstract painting, though it wasn’t my favorite painting.

He never understood how he hurt her

until they found her swimming

in a pool of her own blood. How the

hands of time ran out ever so quickly.

Her death mask showed the face of

a clock that one day just stopped running.

The severed hands of a soul that always

had been searching for fullness.

When finally he held her in his arms again,

he could see that the heart of his twin soul

had stopped beating. She’d engorged on

the love that he fed her. He bent down for

one last kiss, his lies spilled out between

her lips like death maggots. He sucked those

squirming white lies back in knowing

that time would inevitably bring them together

again until the hands of the eternal clock stops

running altogether and his twin soul

would flees from him through wispy

clouds of red, never to be seen again.

Somehow he didn’t recognize Death

painted on her lips & so foolishly he believed

the fable of the timelessness of love

not knowing that one day all great loves

will be washed away in a sea of red.

Real love, like life, is fragile &

therefore temporal, existing only on

the breath of those it leaves behind.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind