When Seeing Does Not Follow

They drifted in front of me as if the air had been shaken and could not quite settle again. Small, patient colors held their stations: a green burst with thin ribs, a mauve cloud that breathed once and then remembered not to, two timid petals that looked around for permission. Nothing touched anything else. They observed a careful distance, like neighbors who share a wall but never a word. I waited for them to arrange themselves into a sentence. They tried; I could see them straining toward some order, the way shy people lean forward without moving. A pale filament crossed the scene like a thought that had lost its subject. From time to time a speck loosened and fell, not downward but into a place where seeing did not follow. I counted these vanishings and pretended it was knowledge. It occurred to me that the colors were not blossoming but rehearsing their leave-taking. Each light had already agreed to be brief. I felt I should introduce myself, yet there was no category under which I could be received. So I stood there, a servant without a task, while the little stars performed their quiet obedience to absence. When at last I turned away, the room kept glowing in the shape of what I could not keep.