Alone on the prairie at night

Alone on the prairie at night

Nocturnal figures shift their phase with the shadows
Skeletons sit at Goya’s wooden table
Dry gold crunches dead under my feet
And fills my lungs from twenty miles away

The rickety house emerges, a ghostly shadow in the dark
With open door swinging like a beckoning finger
Illuminated within by Rothko shades of moonlight
Creaking walls’ stories glance off ignorant ears

Behind the house is another door
Clasped shut by a lock gasping through choking vines
Even undone it defies entrance
Grinding open with hazy Monet’s ceremony of dust

Picasso stacks of derelict boxes suffocate the space inside
Teasing me in the waning light with amorphous dancing
I half-expect to see someone approach from the corners of this rotting garage
Or from the field behind beyond the end of my eyes

Maybe I do...

Painters unknown
Artists from the fringes of experience
People you see but never notice
The dark hides some but illuminates others

Alone on the prairie at night