This week’s painting-prompt at Fifty Two Pieces is Gregory Grenon’s Moth Girl. I couldn’t help but think of it in tandem with Lesley Dill’s Standing Man with Radiating Words:

Restless

It’s after midnight, the weekday just
a few hours ahead. The lamps should be off,
the piano lid closed, the curtains drawn,
the clothes in their hampers or on their hangers,
the laptop powered off. It is not the hour
for fingers on keyboards. But none of the manuals
have chapters on getting to sleep when wings
insist on emerging from our shoulderblades. When
we don’t know how to arrange the blankets
in ways that won’t crease our panache beyond repair
or ding the edges of the letters depending upon
both to give them weight and give them flight. There
is nothing to be done except to continue fumbling
through the almost-silence for whatever semblance
of almost-repose one can retrieve from the shadows:
Martha runs through “Greensleeves” first as a boogie
and then as the blues. Across the room,
Isaac holds a “g” too close, like an umbrella
he will refuse to unfurl even when the rain
showers down as a thousand tiny nails,
glittering to the sight but dull to the ear.
It’s not an hour for sunlight: Martha moves on
to a tune I don’t know, but it’s thick with smoke
and the one drink too many that spells the abyss
between a drunken nap and sleepless sorrow.
It’s a song that’s good company for the self-forlorn:
the letters on Isaac’s back droop into drowsy folds,
and I drift into slumber as Martha eases the song to its end.

– pld