From this window it looks like an interesting situation:

three empty red swivel chairs

and a mountain range backdrop.

The middle chair seems to be asking me

to make sense of it all.

The other two don’t even notice

that they’re in this painting

(or maybe they’re looking through some other painting).

For ten years these chairs have been side by side

and now one stares at me and one looks away and

one seems on the verge of rolling out of control—

its black wheels shuddering.

For ten years three artists have worked side by side,

and now all that is left

are these vacant thrones,

stuck on a strange landscape.

You can sometimes tell the mood of a person

from the way the chair is swiveled after they’ve left.

And to think they are all suspended pigments—

there is something oddly powerful about that.

That chair, about to roll,

forever shackled in bee’s wax.

Caught in the threshold.

Potential energy.

Isn’t that what we do, though?

Suspend our pigments

as they drip and bleed?—

memories, photos, poetry, music, paintings.

Urgently pouring wax to trap the moment

so we can hang it up and figure it out.

My eyes always return to the middle chair as if

I’m looking at my own reflection in the mirror.