The Story: Body

A body is a room with four sides, and it is also the one who lives in the room. The painting gives that fact a frame: a rough rectangle of blue and bone-white, crossed by fire, open at the edges where a life refuses to be sealed.

Four sides of flesh and bone. Earth, body, mind and soul. The poem names the quarters the way a builder names walls, not to confine them but to say what has been carrying the weight. Earth under the feet. Body as the house. Mind as the lamp inside it. Soul as the reason the lamp was lit. Carrying me through years, like light in a lantern. The years are not a burden in this line. They are the distance the light has already traveled without going out.

The blue is the night side of that lantern, dense, almost architectural. The orange is the day side, a stroke that will not be contained by the frame it crosses. Green sits between them, a small living note, the color of what still grows while the structure holds. Drips fall from the lower edge. They are not damage. They are the body remembering it is made of something that moves.

These eyes, hands and feet hold steady to the soil. The most spiritual line in the poem is the most physical. No ascent is offered that abandons the ground. Eyes to see. Hands to make. Feet to stay. The soil is not the opposite of infinity. It is the place from which infinity can be trusted.

One day the walls will fall. The painting has already begun that falling. The rectangle is broken at the right, the top stroke runs past its corner, the bottom line does not close. And the light will reveal the corners of infinity. Not a vague hereafter. Corners. A geometry large enough to include the flesh that carried the lantern, and kind enough not to waste it.

Body is a Painted Poem about the instrument that walks the poems into the world. It does not apologize for having sides. It thanks them. Then it lets the color cross the line, which is how a life tells the truth about its borders: they held, and they were never the whole of the light.

Collection:  Architecture of Stillness