The Chromatic Abyss of Mount Veridian
on slopes where silence curdles into frost,
a man ascends with pigments clenched like prayers,
his breath a specter dancing with the stars.
No pilgrim he of flesh, but one who seeks
the vanished hues behind his hollow eyes—
the vermeil dawns that once baptized his brush,
now bleached to ashen whispers in his skull.
Three decades past, these peaks had sung in jade
when first he trod their spines with easel strapped,
a youth whose veins ran quicksilver with awe.
The glacier’s throat had purled him sapphire hymns,
the pines etched lichen-green against his soul—
but wars waged deep in lowland crucibles
stoleth his hand’s surety, left but this:
a palette knife that trembles like a wound.
He climbs where air grows thin as vellum sheets,
each step a ledger of his waning heat.
The wind, a chorus of ancestral ghosts,
scours his cheeks with scaldings of old shame.
“Return,” they keen, “to where the wolf-light dwells,
where shadow and substance merge at world’s rim—
paint us the truth that festers in your ribs
or join the cataract’s white, wordless hymn.”
At twilight’s hinge, he finds the cobalt cave
where ice flowers bloom with razor petal-throats.
Here knelt he once beside a maiden clad
in foxfire glow, her laughter cracking quartz—
(but no, the mind’s a treacherous weaver’s loom;
was she companion? Muse? Or frost’s mirage?)
The walls exude her scent—bergamot, rue—
his frozen fingers claw at memory’s rind.
He mixes midnight with the glacier’s tears,
daubs streaks of anguish on the groaning stone.
A face emerges—smile of marigold
dissolving into umbers of decay.
“Speak!” cries the wind through stalactite-sharp teeth.
“Define this rot that gnaws creation’s core!”
His answer: brushstrokes frenzied as sleet,
a scream in ochre, umber, manganese.
The mountain shifts—an avalanche of years
crashes through chambers where his hope took root.
Before him gapes the crevasse he fled at dawn—
ice serpents coil where once he’d laid his bed.
Down, down he stares into its azure maw
and sees his father’s hands, ink-stained and stern,
tossing sheaves of landscapes to the hearth—
“True art demands the marrow, not the moon.”
Auroras coil like serpents overhead,
their emerald tongues reciting his defeat.
He flings his last cerulean to the void,
watches it spiral into timelessness.
The easel snaps, a crucifix unbound,
as from the depths there rises slow and wan
a figure woven from his squandered hues—
the painter as he might have been, complete.
This phantom bears a canvas stretched with dawn,
each stroke a psalm of light’s anatomy.
“Behold,” it murmurs through the blizzard’s sieve,
“the self you gutted for their gilded frames.”
Their eyes lock—mirrors of a sundered soul—
then ice begins to suture shut the rift.
He lunges, grasps the vision’s fading hem,
and feels his veins ignite with borrowed fire.
Too late. The chasm seals with finality—
a glacier’s heart cares not for mortal yearns.
His hands, now clawed around a spectral thread,
find only frost that brands them bone-white bare.
The mountain breathes, content in its redress,
as snowflakes stitch his eyelids shut with down.
Beneath the drift, his last thought forms a cloud:
“I should have painted with the blood, not brush.”
Centuries hence, when summer licks the stones,
climbers will find strange pigments in the melt—
crimson swirls that whisper of a throat,
gold leaf pressed where pulse once thrummed unseen.
They’ll pocket them as curios, unaware
they hold the shards of vision’s fractured price,
while high above, the indifferent peak maintains
its vigil over all that seeks—and fails—
to wrest from time the hues it stole at birth.
