When

Caroline Arness

The melody stops
somewhere in Salamanca,
once singing with gold, now
dulled and fragile.  The sun
blinks on the city as if to say
when

In his eyes flecks of gold floated away
and I am lost.
Straining through cavernous black
and yet all I see are green and blue,
Every layer of him,
stripped to ghostly gold stinging
when

The receiver flat lines, that’s all.
What drains more than silence searing
Over distance and into the heart?
His eyes, a Vermeer
chameleon blue and green,
But really it’s the gold’s trick underneath
when

Cold, kind and lemon eyes*
Saw mine.  Saltwater, the color he saw in me. 
Salt water eyes in deed
Blur silver lining or perhaps pure gold,
And I know if, but not

when

*Cold Kind and Lemon Eyes, by Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s