the soft timepiece

Drips, like raindrops or wax candles, like what’s left on the menorah after Hanukkah has run its course, after the world again becomes the color of dirt, snowless and meaningless and timeless. The sky is blue, then yellow, no green, no in-between, just a barren desert land where circles become misshapen hangers-on to corners. An eye closed, a manatee, a shape within a shapeless landscape, meaning itself remains unconscious, unknown.

Dirt, dredge, depression, the year has barely begun yet I’ve begun it writing about melting clocks, about deserts and dreary weather, about a work of art instead of creating a work of art. Or maybe writing about art is itself an art form, ekphrasis, a word my processor insists is misspelled although I copy-pasted it from an existing definition after genuinely misspelling it with two k’s.

The persistence of memory is far from persistent - it fades day after day, forgetfulness a forever fog not unlike the true fog that’s been persistent this winter. Not unlike why I started writing in the first place. Forgotten, the writer of the words may be, but the words remain written. Salvador Dali may be only of interest to art historians, but his painting inspired a word soup some seventy years since he painted it.