Inspirations from Barry X. Ball; An Ekphrasis

For Mark

Martyr,

dear muse, your right hemisphere emerged scabbed,

a tight interlocking of dead scar tissue

textured

to a hemorrhage indescribable.

You have earth on your mind.

You appear as death awakened.

Though my oiled fingertips, my digital prints

ache to savour you underneath,

I dare not disturb you into life, nor stir

the casting of your warm golem flesh,

pursed lips and plebeian nose,

nape turned oscillate.

And nestled in the curve of your heavy throat,

perhaps I derive a basal note-

O, surely it hums with unnatural vitality!

You and I are no more

compacted soil set apart, alone,

while in your igneous basin

vibrates the lowly vibrato of stone.

I cannot look from left,

it is the right that appeals to me,

Whilst from below

your unmaiden form wizens to a tarnished solemnity,

your thoughts protrude

unweeping buboes from your visage-fore,

though by no artistic measure did bone'd fingers raise those cold indented sores.

A face that is unhungry,

paused in marble-top relief

 finds a double

in the foliate margins of similar height.

I too am wounded on the right!

I too would protrude,

hideous, malformed, unsmoothed in my etching,

a rendering disparate from castings they make.

As I whisper in your ear do you silently quicken?

Do those utmost molecules begin to mistake

my sounds in the flushing of their own?

You and I, we are a bitter poignancy when the inside gives clue by the out.

Doubt in context, free from frame,

against the bitter whiteness we become

a tyranny of coalescence,

and those who made us,

man by machine by initial vision,

fall away when we stand singular.

No breath, no bone except for stone

no tiding shoulders to shrug the blows

no feet to move from this uncertain sight,

we in repose

with granite lids closed upon untold imaginings.

Yet I imagine my palm atop your conical cranium,

the cool permutation of flesh against skull,

burrowed in the ruddy slivers of

your offset widow's peak.

I would, if allowed,

trace the mineral rivers from occipital to unknit brow

and further.

And would you, of all,

alike as we are,

begrudge me the intimacy of my blind solemn tips,

were I to begin at the nape and linger

at the rose-aligned compass of your lips?

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