The Garden of Unfinished Hours

Here came a painter, gaunt with restless breath,
His palette parched as autumn’s withered cheek,
To seek the muse that lingered near his death—
A spark to wake the colors passion seeks.
The sundial, slanting through the briar’s snare,
Pointed its gnomon at a name half-scarred,
Where lichen veiled the letters “Ambrose, Clare,”
And centuries had cracked the marble hard.

He traced the paths where peonies once wept
In crimson tides beneath the moon’s cold eye,
Now thorn and thistle where their glory slept,
Their fragrance drowned in time’s unyielding sigh.
A fountain choked with leaves of copper hue
Murmured a dirge for waters long since stilled,
While marble nymphs, their faces weathered through,
Held empty urns from which no nectar spilled.

Beneath an oak, its branches clawing sky
Like skeletal hands pleading for reprieve,
He found a box of tarnished silver, nigh
To crumbling where the roots began to heave.
Within, a letter, brittle as the frost
That grips the final rose of fleeting June,
Its ink now faint where ardent hands had crossed
To seal a vow beneath fate’s harshest moon.

“To Ambrose, whose brush once stole the dawn’s own light,
Who painted dreams upon this garden’s soul—
The lilies blush where once we met by night,
The willow guards the bench where hearts were whole.
But years have fled like petals on the stream,
And I, who lingered as your twilight muse,
Now fade where mortal hands cannot redeem
The vows we forged in hues of ardent hues.

Seek not my face in shadows you transpose,
Nor chase my voice in whispers of the vine.
The garden keeps the love that time erodes,
Yet grants no balm for wounds it can’t confine.
Farewell, my painter of the stolen dawn,
Who framed my soul in strokes no tears efface—
Though flesh must yield, let this frail page live on
As testament to beauty’s brief embrace.”

The painter knelt, the page pressed to his breast,
As if to still the heart that threatened flight.
The wind arose, a phantom from the west,
To chant the garden’s anthem of the night.
“O Clare,” he cried, “whose name these stones respire,
Whose ghost in every leaf and petal dwells,
Ignite the ash of my expired fire,
And bid my brush reclaim where sorrow swells!”

But silence pooled where echoes might have stirred,
Save for the oak’s lament, its branches bare.
No specter rose, no whisper breathed a word—
Only the scent of jasmine, thin and rare.
He dipped his brush in twilight’s dying glow,
In ochre streaks and indigo despair,
And strove to paint the face he could not know,
Yet found each stroke a specter of her hair.

Days bled to nights where stars, like teardrops, froze
Above the easel perched on broken ground.
He mixed his hues with dew from long-dead rose
And ground the pigments where her name was found.
The portrait grew—a face without a name,
A gaze that held the weight of vanished springs,
A smile carved by time’s ungentlest flame,
Yet eyes that knew the toll of endless things.

One eve, as mist embraced the garden’s shroud,
He laid his brush beside the unfinished art,
And felt the chill of death’s approaching cloud
Creep through his veins to still the beating heart.
The letter slipped from fingers pale and thin,
A leaf descending to its earthen bed,
While rain began to weep where he had been,
To blur the lines of beauty’s fleeting thread.

They found him when the dawn, in meek disguise,
Unveiled the garden’s hoard of buried pain—
The canvas bowed beneath indifferent skies,
A face half-formed, consumed by time’s disdain.
The letter, clasped by roots that twist and yearn,
Now sleeps where none may dare to breach the soil,
And pilgrims come to watch the ivy churn
O’er gates that guard both genius and turmoil.

Thus lingers still the tale of brush and bloom,
Of love inscribed in hues that none restore.
The garden keeps its pact with timeless gloom,
Where beauty lives—and dies—forevermore.