Self-Portrait with Goffstown Deep Black and Sun-Up Intensity

Black at its blackest. A town asleep. The only way to walk deeper into the black where the weatherboard homesteads seem to rise.

I edge, like the blind, down the rainy incline which is a tunnel channeling one thought to the end of it: leave her in this town.

Leave her among the quiet woods and the saturated grass; leave her where some say she belongs, give her back her life, her family and her shiver of trees now shedding their way to cicatrix in the season she most adores, now black, black-leaved, black-boled.

Such dark can funnel you the decision when its walls are close so turn, right now, turn right now, turn right now – to see above the town such a vast ingot-ring hemorrhage out from the mountains and take away your choice. It dents, it stabs, your pupils with its intensity. It says love is the havoc at which you cannot balk. Take her out of this place which holds her, stunts her, neglects her, a million miles from the world;

the sun’s further off, over the gulf throbs in furious truth: it says, know her, you have found her. Take her from this place.

Against the depths of black, it says, this the insistent brilliance: it burns behind your sternum and it burns behind hers.

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Arcimboldo’s Bulldog