Poem: Greybreak

 

Greybreak

 

sleet

smacked slushy emoticons onto the pane,

none of them the bright yellow smile.

no matter how hard

i worked not to see,

the blips stared to accuse,

fish-like or sad, kind or childish,

and many an unlikely love

lost in the slip.

at times, the myriad menagerie

melted to mutate down the glass,

a liquid portrait of singular feat.

i glanced a seepy Hébuterne

near a sparkle of angel, flashy of vane.

but as well there were worst holes

of lost hope and gnawing spiders,

the sort of prison in a mirror

which never acknowledges

the jail-keeper’s keys.

it went on for hours,

the exigent whimsy of this stormy parade.

by the end i was struggling,

never unfresh, to flee a landscape

of tears.

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Jeanne Hébuterne, 1898-1920