Butter and Eggs

Butter and Eggs

I saw my future in a painting.
Butter and Eggs, or so the artist said,
with threadlike, winded stems rooted under rock.
Fluted, the flower is like a virgin’s skirt
at the whim of a cheeky gust, revealing a
shock of yellow that implies repressed blaze.
From the bottom, it is the underside of a toad’s chin;
smooth, fish-like, and white, the base of the cage
where the dragonfly has been confined,
snapped from its glide along the glassy skin of a midsummer lake.
I saw the beauty and the risk, and I saw
the good of me haloing fear and brilliance.

I wake in a room with a different painting,
full of wet pastures, grazing sheep and haunted trees,
but I’m in it as well, despite lacking form.
It is not the future, but is the past;
the past of those who came before me,
those who breathed me life all those thousands of mornings ago.
It is the past of when the love was new,
and I set the path of the brush.
Each stroke was one of lush ambition, with
a storm-bent sky leering over a soft, green field,
the balance in between unpainted, but vivid, even so.
To me, it feels like velvet; it is a feather pillow and a downy bed.
It is the peace I sought for years and what I continue to work for.

I cook in a yellow kitchen with white cupboards
and brushed nickel handles.
It is warm, despite the cold steel that catches the
crisp glint of the winter sun just as night is about to move in.
This is my present, with its cyclic zephyr of strong coffee
and the piqued huff of a grease-spattered kettle.
A smaller artist joins us now, with tiny, clumsy hands
and a fondness for pink and purple.
The work is unframed, but it hangs where it can be seen,
feverishly composed with mirth and unaffected vision;
butterflies with polka-dots, unicorns with wings.

I patiently rock back and forth in front of a crackling pan,
humming with distraction, the smell of butter and eggs on me.