For G. C. With thanks to dVerse for the prompt, and to the late Alma Thomas for her remarkable artwork.
That sleepless night after I'd confessed
my feelings to you, I closed my eyes
to find nothing but a blue circle
on a black canvas. Neither the
color nor shape of a bruise,
nor anything to rhyme
with nothing but a
formless feeling
without sound.
Then I learned
its name—longing:
copied its blue-green
syllables; scattered notes
ringing with each other's
yearning; and placed them
into concentric rings around
that sleepless circle: soft flower
whose violet scent I breathed anew.
But when we basked again in one another's presence
with bursts of orange laughter and amber joy,
I placed the petals—how lovely their luminescence!—
at the circles' scarlet edge, from where the eye
revealed another word unseen, unheard: eclipse.
Notes
I wrote “Eclipse” in response to Melissa’s prompt at dVerse: an invitation to write “something beautiful” through reflection on the spellbinding works of the late American painter Alma Thomas (1891-1978). A trailblazing African American female artist, Thomas became best known in the mid-twentieth century for her highly expressive use of vibrant color, a quality that perhaps shines through most clearly in her 1970 work The Eclipse. Other paintings in her late oeuvre seize on the similar potential of color, symmetry, and geometric imprecision to evoke deep feeling through abstraction.
At the same time, “Eclipse” is also dedicated to G. C., whose boundless warmth, heartfelt friendship, and unfailing support helped unlock my desire to write, and keep writing, poetry: a desire I may never have acted upon had our paths not crossed for such a brief but beautifully brilliant spell in my life.
In that spirit, I’ll leave the final word to Thomas, who once explained her rationale for painting in a 1979 interview with Eleanor Munro of The Washington Post:
I’ve never bothered painting the ugly things in life. People struggling, having difficulty. You meet that when you go out, and then you have to come back and see the same thing hanging on the wall. No. I wanted something beautiful that you could sit down and look at.
With thanks as always for reading! —Chris
Between Two Rivers 
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