Beige

They live in a room of macramé and china

Grandmother's knitting cashmere and fates

Her eyes lighten air with a pretense of wisdom

Her agelessness hypnotizes each atom of dust

Lulling them into slumber…

Her wrinkles fracture her face in uneven segments of flesh

Slices that drain on the shirt she's preparing

For gentlemen-callers as old as the fairies

Whom she had taught the little one manners for

The manner of fear, the pearl in her dowry…

Her lovely ballerina, so well-behaved,

Always sitting on the side of an armchair

Thinking some beau with a tweed hat

And a fat bouquet in his left arm

Would love her for that…

The air is cluttered with cupboards that smell

Like wood in its terminal phase

Moths fret around, a little limp now

Never turned into butterflies

Ignorant of the test they failed

In respect of a natural course of becoming.

The room is obscured by the beige paint on its windows

The walls are damp and the velvet is shriveled

But she's still keeping her hands polite on her knees

Trying to hear a knock on the door,

A knock her grandmother had always prepared her for

The man with the hat and the white sheet;

She sits on her armchair, toying with china

Fearing the door and strangling the sparks

Not knowing the fact that their house has no backyard,

Its synonymies failing to sprawl in a world that derides them,

But it's placed instead in the town's pile of trash

Where everyone throws their holed socks.

Go to sleep, my beautiful lily

The grandmother mumbles serenely,

And so she obliges, at peace with her pillows,

She falls into slumber, time she elopes;

Salt slips from the ceiling and covers her gently:

Dormant she lies afraid of that knock

Unwitting she failed to arrive on her date.