"Corazon" by Noelle Kocot

In the fixed fire that rises from your name,I detect a mysterious and noble fate.A gift, I suspect, infusing the ordinarily cool blueOf these hospital walls with an inner warmth,Like the girl in the Vermeer, where the focusIs on eternal life rather than the EucharisticOffering of bread, which further dignifiesHer role, or like his Saint PrassedeSqueezing a martyr's blood from a spongeInto an elegant ewer.  The halationOf highlights around your hairIs a landscape fraught with feverWhere so many of the ignorant are shipwrecked.Who's to say what roles are dignified?Some things have just plain exhausted themselves,And you might well be one of them,The way you stretch yourself out among the fallenDominoes of afternoons.It is as strange and intimate as a missing roof,To witness you squandering your griefSo unwittingly, it is a ruinousAnd protracted war with no acceptable resolution,How you manage again and againNot to pull yourself over the valleysOf this magnetized world.In fact, it is beyond me, as I am never lostIn that dream-like stillness of regret,Because I know the events before our eyesAre not as real as the mirror imageOf the light that anchors usBoth to this light-filled room.You see, I've learned to stretch the canvasOf my life into a boundless river,To elongate and subtly alter the lieBy taking the F from the ineffable fictionOf the original word and grinding it upInto a pigment that bathes these wallsIn a seascape which I leave behindIn hopes that you may someday swimWith fullest reverence past it.