Safe Harbor
(for a painting by the same name)

Divided into two rectangular panels,
it looks like a hundred-year-old photograph,
romantically blurred so that everyone's imagination
has room to roam inside its vast spaces.

I stare at the dark green swirls of the picture
hoping to reach into their faint center to my own destination,
a place that I cannot see but feel
whole-bodied inside the deliberate paint strokes,
warm tones and opaque smudges.

I smile childlike, contented
at the thought of a place where clocks
never stop running
and one can fall asleep in a room with a locked door and never
run out of air.
Where the most satisfying of dreams don't just happen
during the day, with your consent, but too at night
when sobbing and sweaty terror never arrive
to initiate the long tortured night.
Where intestines don't boil
and screams don't run away or hide,
nothing hides.
Where the path trails off in a cozy
blur she must have mixed so thoughtfully
on her palette.

I sit here contemplating my home among the swirls
but away from them, safe in the color of forests,
my surroundings clean and earthy,
simultaneously warm and chill,
like mud packed near the base of a tree.