Did it occur to the artist in the act of painting
the woman as if she were asleep
to wonder what it was that had made her
so weary that centuries later she’ll still be
sleeping? Each brushstroke mimics arcs
the eyes follow behind closed lids, the signature
of dreaming, graceful patterns,
like those the stoic bodies of acrobats form
in air, practiced & timed so no one ever falls,
with or without a net. Can each brushstroke be said
to be the signature of the woman’s scented breath
as, in her sleep, she murmurs her lover’s name
& then starts to hum a hymn she remembers
from when she was a girl & didn’t know
how tired you can get? Of everything. So
all you want to do is sleep & forget,
maybe whisper in your sleep it all happened
to someone else. To whisper this
until when you wake you believe it,
that words, chanted as if sacred,
can revise everything as a woman sleeps.
George Looney’s books include the forthcoming The Visibility of Things Long Submerged which won the BOA Editions Short Fiction Award, Ode to the Earth in Translation (Red Mountain Press), a collection of stories, The Worst May Be Over, which won the Elixir Press Fiction Award, The Itinerate Circus: New and Selected Poems 1995-2020 (Red Mountain Press), the Red Mountain Press Poetry Award-winning What Light Becomes: The Turner Variations, the novel, Report from a Place of Burning, which was co-winner of The Leapfrog Press Fiction Award, among others. He is the founder of the BFA in Creative Writing Program at Penn State Erie, editor-in-chief of the international literary journal Lake Effect, translation editor of Mid-American Review, and co-founder of the original Chautauqua Writers’ Festival.