Your image
reaches me and leaves me
like a muse.
On your forehead like strokes
I see footprints of memories.
And like a fugitive,
foreseeing that I’m arriving,
your skin is a canvas that unravels.
NOTES:
* Basil Hallward is the name of a character in Oscar Wilde’s novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray”. He is the artist that actually paints the portrait.
* Some time later I rewrote this poem in Spanish; and even later, in 2007, that translation became the base for the lyrics to the song “El Sueño de Basil Hallward“ by my band Teatro Fantasma.