Untitled Poem (One Must Sit in the Darkness)

To distract myself from the noise of a German crowd at the next table, I conjure a blue horse with the head of Leonora Carrington. She slips into a bodice made of shards of mirrors and weaves in and out of the trees of a French forest. She does a terrible job evading Nazis, at dusk her blue and shimmering figure too easy to spot between the dark grey and brown trunks. Murakami tells me that it will rain tomorrow if a polar bear eats the stars tonight, and he is not wrong, as it happens, the moon, closing in on full, is blurred by a thin veil of clouds, like an opaque sheath for a cratered oatmeal cookie. It only makes me love her more, knowing she will escape, as the hard rains fall and wash the paint from her saddled back, as she disappears into insanity without Max. I think she is following me around (or am I following her?), but it is too late in life to know any more, without being certain whether, eventually (and this too is stolen from Murakami), the jumble of knots will loose; be patient, she neighs in echoes, unravelling takes time, she whinnies in straits– one must sit in the darkness long enough for the eyes to adjust, to see a way out, to carve a door, into the black canvas of the mind.