The Painter’s Isle of Unspoken Hues
A vessel frail did kiss the frothing brine,
Where waves, like tongues of silver, licked the stones
Of shores untrod by mortals’ fleeting tread.
There stepped a soul adrift in pallor’s guise,
A painter cloaked in dusk’s unspoken ache,
His brushes dry as vows forgot by time,
His canvases but tombs of vacant dreams.
The isle, a siren swathed in mist and myth,
Unfurled her secrets slow as poison sweet:
Her cliffs, like ribs of some leviathan,
Her forests humming dirges to the moon.
He wandered where the salt-scarred pines did weep,
Their amber tears embalming mossy stones,
Till through the fog there bloomed a spectral light—
A cottage perched where sea and shadow wed.
Within, the air was thick with jasmine’s ghost,
And there she stood—not flesh, nor yet a shade—
A woman wrought from tempests’ hidden verse,
Her eyes twin pools where constellations drowned.
No name she bore save whispers of the tide,
No past but that which waves erase at dawn.
Her voice, the ache of cellos lost at sea,
Did coil round his ribs like ivy’s claim.
“What specter haunts these walls?” the painter breathed,
His palette trembling as a moth’s last wing.
“No specter,” murmured she, “but prisoner
To tides that bind me to this lonely rock.
The moon my jailer, waves my iron chain,
I wait for tides that never kiss the shore.”
And in her gaze, he glimpsed the unspun threads
Of stories choked by salt and endless years.
Days bled to weeks as brushstrokes learned her form—
The curve where neck meets shoulder, steeped in dusk,
The way her hair devoured every light,
A midnight river starving for the stars.
She spoke in riddles woven through with grief,
Of lovers’ bones ground fine as seafoam’s lace,
Of storms that stole the island’s beating heart
And left it cold as cliffs no sun could warm.
“Why linger here,” he pled, “when mainland bells
Still toll for those who dare to clutch at dawn?”
Her laughter, bitter as the kelp’s last breath:
“You see the cage, yet miss the captive’s wings.
What use is flight when every sky’s a wall?
The curse writes deeper than the flesh allows.”
He painted fiercer, desperate to trap
Her essence ‘fore the sea could steal her shape.
At night, the cottage groaned with phantom winds,
And through the cracks, the ocean’s voice crept in—
A hiss of “Soon, soon, soon,” in liquid tongues,
While she would trace his palms with ghostly chalk.
“Beware the moon when wears she silver’s mask,
For then the veil grows thin as anguished hope.
No brush can paint what tides refuse to yield—
Nor hand grasp what the depths have sworn to keep.”
Yet foolish as the moth that woos the flame,
He fed his heart to shadows’ sweet deceit.
Their fingers met where lamplight pooled like wine,
A touch that seared yet left no fingerprint.
“If love be but the echo ‘fore the plunge,”
He vowed, “then let us fall with open eyes.”
Her kiss tasted of brine and endings sharp—
A requiem dressed in the guise of dawn.
The fatal night arrived on selkie feet,
The moon a bloated pearl in sable skies.
The sea withdrew, a gasp before the scream,
Revealing bones that glowed like cursed pearls.
She stood where waves once knelt, her form unspun
To threads of mist and memory’s frail dust.
“The tide demands its tithe of borrowed time,”
She sighed, “and we but brushstrokes on its scroll.”
He clutched at vapors, staining hands with naught,
While winds unscrolled her into naked air.
The cottage crumbled to a poet’s sigh,
The pines collapsed like notes from broken strings.
Alone amidst the island’s ashen breath,
He found his final canvas, pristine white—
And there, in pigments mixed with tears and brine,
He painted what no mortal eye could see:
Her face, a symphony of stolen dawns,
Her soul, the bridge ‘twixt tempest and man’s breast.
As last stroke dried, the sea rose, ravenous,
To claim the isle and all his borrowed dreams.
The waves, like lovers fierce, embraced the cliffs,
And where his masterpiece drank salt and foam,
There bloomed a shadow ‘neath the moon’s cold gaze—
Two figures woven into seafoam’s lace.
Now sailors whisper of a spectral glow
Where tides caress the bones of cliffs long dead.
They speak of faces in the moonlit spray—
A man who paints with fingers made of mist,
A woman’s laugh that drowns in crashing waves,
And canvases that melt like lovers’ vows.
But none dare touch the shore where shadows weep,
Lest they too learn how beauty rends the soul.
