You lie as if dropped from the sky
just across the room,
your blouse open to the waist,
eyes closed, mouth slightly open, asleep.

Sweeping curves
which cut across the surface of the bed
suggest the passage of a life at high speed.
The white strip on the left-hand side represents the road,
the green the landscape,
the blue the sky.

Your dream is a tempestuous blend
of primary colours and furious brushwork.
Your eyelids are a rapid veil
through which abstract forms
derived from organic shapes such as flowers,
milkweed and cocoons can be vaguely discerned.
You sense that there is something hidden
beyond the knitted brow of the hill.

Sleep for you is a gruelling and dangerous process
in which you attempt to understand different states of being
and your relationship with your own body,
ultimately reaching out to find universal and spiritual bonds.
Yet this sense of bustling activity is counteracted
by the calm solemnity of the undergound travellers.
Whether close friends or anonymous city-dwellers,
your subjects usually appear isolated,
consumed by thought
and almost always weighed down by thick outlines.

Your dreams are measured in wingspan,
powerful and graceful,
expressing the idea of soaring freedom,
yet they are also a perpetual handicap
confining you in the veering gallery space of this low-slung world.

You are an exercise in perfect but seemingly impossible balance.

The room is full of signs of human presence,
the wine bottle and bread crumbs,
toppled shoes,
a dishevelled violin bow.
You have created this familiar atmosphere
by employing a very high horizon
and by arranging the various lines in the work
so that they lead the eye off in several different directions.

And so I ask myself why it is impossible not to look at you.

You are a monochrome in shades of gray,
a preliminary drawing in full size
executed entirely with a brush and usually in a wash.
And this gradual visibility of underlayers with the passage of time,
this bleeding through:
my love, your skin is a canvas,
your hands are filled with colours,
your heart beats outstretched in gilded brocades,
your blood is wet paint,
your eyes moving light,
your mouth sleepy music.

And this is the story of how I became a nightwatchman.

. . .

copyright 2000, Linford Detweiler