The Portrait of Lara

I am not here now, I am in my hand; and my hand is in the drawing, and the drawing is in her eyes. She is all that’s here now; I am gone, forgotten, lost. She is in the drawing, breathing on my hand.

And now my hand is gone and there is only her and the sound of her breathing. And now she, too, is gone; and the table is gone and the room is gone and its all over and the drawing is done.

It’s three o’clock in the morning -- I push the pad away. I cannot look at her now, not yet. I have done with her and I am spent, I am drained and empty. The hand rests, flaccid and limp upon the table. I feel…a sense of loss, a sadness.

The spectator returns and sits down inside me: I am the spectator now; the artist disappears. I look at the artist’s work -- it is incomplete: it is her, and it is him, it is her having passed through him. She exists now, she is real. But she exists in nothing, not even a nebulous mist, she exists in blankness, in whiteness, in nothing: the background exists in the artist’s head -- not in the front of his head like an image, but in the back of his head like a half-remembered dream, like a name on the tip of your tongue.
And the name is Lara.

1981