A MOMENT’S MONUMENT IN THE STUDIO

The rectangle is a sounding board for the spirit:
Brice Marden

What it is to stand at a careful remove
beneath leafless trees, the body concealed,
hands gripping painted panels that reveal
the common dark, the forgotten light, a fog
displaced by ghostly portraits scrubbed out.
A woman rests below on air, eyes sealed,
fingers holding tight to transparency,
that invisible means of protection,
a way to feel, to see within and without.
The artist stands naked and unprotected,
bathed in art’s golden light, eyes connected
to a still blank canvas, hoping to coax
from absence a luminositv reframed as love —
a refraction, hiding nothing, not even sorrow.