POEM: My Life Without Its Art

My Life Without Its Art

Sadness returns with its exacting aim

and finds the seam I thought had been repaired.

Why do I open rooms beneath my skin

for lives that enter, then depart,

their false names folded in the vanished hours?

They take the private radiance I give,

then cross the guarded borders of the flesh.

By morning, even anger has withdrawn.

I wake beneath the sadness they have made,

ashamed I thought the door and hours were ours.

And now my body alters as I watch.

An ancient woman walks through all my rooms;

she wears my face and drags my limbs through fire,

arranging all her years and weight beneath

my skin. She drinks the iron from my blood

and leaves me nothing I can live upon.

My heart misfires; its clusters flower

in white, meticulous violence behind

an eye that once could apprehend each shade.

I miss the sharp precision of my hands,

the graphite dusk, the gold obeying breath.

I told my love: I cannot stay alive

without my stories fastened to my eyes,

without my stories waking in my hands.

The world extends its help in clinical spoons.

I only want my art. I want what's mine.

No one will kneel beside this dwindling life.

No one ever has. No witness sees

me gather all the pigments to my breasts,

or brushes hardening slowly in their jars.

My unfinished figures now turn away,

as though they, too, have learned to leave me here.

Why did they hate the softness I disclosed?

Why was my trust a room to vandalize?

Why does my own blood organize against me?

I gave them everything in me that gleamed.

Now even sorrow cannot draw my face.

It only signs its name

where mine had been.

Marni Fraser

0720|2026

VIII:XXVII A.M.

The Table | 05.2024