The Starving Canvas
A painter treads the dunes, where life contends with death.
His palette, cracked and parched as bones beneath the sun,
Holds pigments of a soul whose masterpiece’s undone.
The desert, vast and cruel, its contours lean and stark,
Mirrors the hollowed chambers of his aching, barren heart.
No muse descends to kiss his brow with whispered fire,
No visions dance like seraphim on sands of sapphire.
The winds, those ancient minstrels, chant a dirge of dust,
Where once cascades of color bled from faith and trust.
He scans the ashen heavens, seeking one fixed light—
A star to guide his brush through art’s eclipsed night.
Three moons have waxed and waned since last his hand found grace,
When strokes flowed free as rivers, time lost in embrace.
But now each bristle stiffens, frozen mid-desire,
As if the very act of hope might scorch the wire
That binds his mind to memory—a face, a name,
A voice that once declared his brushwork heaven’s claim.
On seventh night, a glimmer pierces vaulted black—
Not Venus’s coy wink nor Mars’s wrathful track,
But silver, pure and pleading, trembles low and near,
As though some tear of God had breached the mortal sphere.
“At last!” he cries, the dunes resounding with his pain,
“O lamp of distant mercy, rend this stifling chain!”
He runs, a mad Ophelia through the waves of sand,
His shadow stretched and gasping, clawing at her hand.
The star, it seems, recedes as he draws close to clutch,
Yet casts a spectral halo just beyond his touch.
All night he stumbles, raving, till his knees give way,
And there, beneath cold radiance, his hands begin to pray:
“If thou art phantom, leave me not to phantom’s fate—
To paint with shades of absence, love that comes too late.
But if thou’rt flesh, though forged from cosmic fire and snow,
Descend! Let brush and firmament one kinship know.”
The heavens hold their silence. Then—a shift, a sigh—
The star descends in rivulets of liquid sky,
Condensing to a woman wrought from starlight’s thread,
Her hair a comet’s wake, her eyes where galaxies are bred.
No mortal speech she utters, yet her voice resounds
In hues no human tongue nor earthly scale compounds:
“Thou call’st me forth from realms where time’s tide cannot flow,
To walk this withered stage where joy and grief must grow.
Three nights I’ll grant thee, artist, to immortalize
This meeting of the finite and the infinite skies.
But when the sands drink midnight’s third and final tear,
I fade—and with me, all thou hold’st luminous here.”
He weeps, not questioning this pact with radiant wraith,
And lifts his brush like Orpheus defying deathly faith.
Day first: he paints her essence, not her form’s strict lines—
The way her presence bends the air where desert pines
Might yearn to grow; the cadence of her light’s slow pulse
That mocks the sun’s tyranny, the moon’s dim vaults.
She watches, star-made lips half-parted in a song
That haunts like rain denied to thirsting fields too long.
At times, her fingers hover where his shadows blend,
Correcting with a touch no mortal hand could lend.
“Why bend thy grace,” he murmurs, “to my flawed design?”
“All art,” she sighs, “is bridge ‘twift mortal and divine.”
Day second: deeper ventures into peril’s keep.
He daubs her eyes—those wells where unborn worlds sleep—
And finds therein reflections of his own frail span,
A flicker soon extinguished in eternity’s span.
“Teach me,” he begs, “to trap time’s flight in cobalt oils!”
“Time captured dies,” she mourns. “True beauty is time’s spoils.”
Now dawns third day—the air thick with unspoken tolls.
He paints her mouth, but here the cruelest doubt unrolls:
Each stroke that seeks to fix her steals her living glow,
As love, when clutched too fiercely, dims to hollow show.
“Stay!” he implores. “What god condemns such light to die?”
“The law that binds the star to bid the earth goodbye.”
Twilight descends, the cruelest judge. His work near done—
A portrait bleeding starlight, masterpiece begun.
But in the western reaches, shadows start to creep,
And in their tide, her luminance begins to seep.
“One hour more!” he thunders at the tilting sphere.
“One hour less,” she whispers, “and I’d stay a year.”
He seizes brush to finalize the pendant ‘round her throat—
A gemstone forged from whispers, hope’s most fragile note.
But as he leans to blend the highlight’s tender kiss,
Her form dissolves like alabaster into mist.
The canvas drinks her parting—one last, desperate flood—
Leaving but dust and echoes where celestial and mortal stood.
At dawn, nomads find him, curled ‘gainst sandstone’s breast,
His arms wrapped ‘round the painting, frozen in death’s rest.
The work? A swirl of anguish, half-remembered grace—
A star’s ghost limned in ochre, fading into space.
They say the dunes now whisper when the stars align,
Of love that dared to paint the divine.
