This night has come back like a promise, by Leela Srinivasan

The Stevedores in Arles, by Vincent van Gogh (Netherlands) 1888

This night has come back like a promise--

not the clouds, but the patterns beneath them
oil-dabbed & egg-yolked, homes stacked

side by side in a game of chess. We’d make 
the landscape holy if we could, bless & baptize,

let the amber river soak us from ankle to scalp. Where ships
come & go & call back again. We take them with their skeletons,

wipe salt off each our backs before it dries into a crust.
This is a world where everyone survives & if they don’t,

at least they allow themselves to leak, membranes porous,
diffusing the edge between body & boat. Nothing can wound us

but spilling weeds, oversaturated skin, the silk that reached
earth before us & what will linger after that. Nothing hurts

more than permanence, addicting like the dark. We once believed
in a god that would love us so much that he’d leave us alone.

But somehow we are still seen, regrettably, in specks of paint,
glow that drips & splotches from above. For a home after war

is less home than flower: inky petals, silken seeds. We rest
our heads in cocoons, let months & footprints gather up in rings;

carving new idols from mud & leaves, ash & song, & putting them 
in corners nobody can see. Sometimes after night we stop speaking, 

stop sleeping, wanting nothing more than for water to outlast 
our descendants. & that’s that: we come from myth, a gasp, 

wide veins run through by lead. We don’t own anything 
& we wouldn’t want to if we could. A painter died hundreds 

of years ago & we’re still turning to one another to ask 
if he had morals, honest hands, if we’re yet allowed to mourn.
​
Leela Srinivasan
​
Leela Srinivasan is an MFA student at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. Originally from the Jersey Shore, she holds a BA in Psychology and MA in Communication from Stanford University, where she wrote and published a collection of psychological poetry as her undergraduate honors thesis. She currently lives in Austin, Texas.