The Artist’s Mirage
Where time dissolves like salt in ceaseless wind,
There walked a man whose soul was etched in shale—
An artist cursed to seek what none could find.
His hands, once deft as swallows in their flight,
Now trembled, raw from carving barren stone;
Each chisel-stroke a plea against the night,
A prayer to forces colder than his own.
The dunes, like lions crouched in golden coils,
Watched silent as he knelt to trace her face—
A specter woven from the sun’s own toil,
A muse who fled the confines of his grace.
“O phantom of my most forsaken dream,”
He whispered to the shadows, sharp and lean,
“Why paint your smile in every fading gleam,
Then vanish where the void and light convene?”
No answer came but sand’s unending hymn,
A chorus shrill as glass, yet soft as down.
Her eyes, twin stars that once had guided him,
Now drowned beneath horizons’ ashen crown.
He’d known her first in twilight’s fragile hour,
When dusk had spilled its ink across the plains—
A figure wreathed in jasmine, frail as flower,
Her voice a lullaby of ancient rains.
“What mortal hand may hold a breath of storm?”
She’d sighed, her fingers brushing dust from his.
“What canvas traps the moon’s ephemeral form?
You chase a fire that feeds on what it misses.”
Yet still he’d vowed to bind her with his art,
To fix her grace in pigment, line, and verse—
A fool’s contract, inscribed upon his heart,
A dirge foretold in every whispered curse.
Through days that bled like wounds upon the sky,
He labored, building temples from the air—
A palace arched with ribs of memory,
Its halls adorned with portraits of her hair.
But sand will seep through every splintered crack,
And winds unravel even gods’ designs;
His walls collapsed to nothing at her back,
While she, untouched, drank moonlight from his vines.
One eve, as vultures scribbled o’er the dunes,
She came, her gown a ripple in the heat.
“Poor architect of transitory runes,”
She mourned, “your hands were made for defeat.
The earth denies the permanence you crave—
Each stroke you bleed will fade beneath the years.
I am the whisper lost beyond the grave,
The ache that dries to salt in lovers’ tears.”
He clutched her shadow, crumbling in his grip,
And wept—a sound like roots torn from the clay.
“If love is but the desert’s parched eclipse,
Why carve your name across my ribs each day?
Why let me taste the well I cannot keep,
Or haunt the hollow where your absence sleeps?”
Her laughter coiled, a viper, soft and deep:
“To teach the stars how beauty mourns in leaps.”
Then dawn unfurled its talons, gold and dire,
And she, unbound, dissolved in spectral mist—
A wisp of silver fraying from the pyre,
A pulse of light his fists could never fist.
Alone, he gouged her likeness in the waste,
A monument to thirst that choked his throat.
The sands, indifferent, swarmed with practiced haste,
To bury both the sculptor and his mote.
Now travelers who brave that blistered realm
Speak low of shapes that shift beneath the glare—
A man forever chasing phantoms’ helm,
A woman’s laugh that freezes in the air.
They say the dunes still breathe his final cry,
A note held till the sun gnaws through the west;
That art and love are questions asked of sky,
And all replies are swallowed by the quest.
Beneath the weight of centuries’ slow tread,
His bones have merged with quartz and scorpion shell.
Yet sometimes, when the moon bleeds copper-red,
Two shadows dance where once the mirage fell—
One shaped of endless, unconsoled desire,
The other, formless as the wind’s refrain,
Their union brief as sparks from deadened fire,
A testament to all that dies unslain.
“`
