Sunday 13 April 2008

Ourorbouros

Moonlight falls through the gaps in the curtains and the room is like a black and white photograph. You are asleep in the bed, a shadowed hump, with a bare shoulder like a blazon in the night. Dark hair spread across the paleness of the pillow, contrasting your sallow skin, is like an inverse halo, a penumbra gone somehow wrong. Not for the first time I have the feeling that I am caught in a painting; that you and I will never move again; that we are frozen in time, waiting forever while other people puzzle over our meaning. Are we lovers, doubting ourselves, waiting for morning and the revelation of sunlight; or we stalker and victim knowing that for one of us the sun will never rise again?

If we are stalker and victim, then is it too late to end the hunt, pull back from the quarry, relax and embrace hesitation? Or is obsession too coarse in itself to permit such an ending?

I lean forward, resting my chin on my fist, my elbow on my knee, feeling self-conscious. You have laughed at me so many times, calling me your Thinker after the statue, and I have laughed with you and accepted your teasing with gracious good humour. And so the hours pass, as I watch you sleep and you dream of me thinking, and the snake eats its tail eternally.

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