crude painting by a savage hand – Daniel Harlow

September 26, 2025

& none of this happened but all of it is always happening & that is the terror of it though maybe the solace too & she sits though not sitting exactly but arrested mid-collapse beside the window where the curtain lifts its hem like a woman revealing just enough to turn cruelty into devotion & the cars pass & the old men pass & the wind rustles in the flower beds planted by someone she never sees & there is always a voice or a sound or a man whispering into the telephone & when she hears it she lifts her hand to her face that marionette gesture again the one that says please not now but also yes I live to return to this moment because she recalls it distinctly as one simultaneous sensation sometimes in order sometimes in pieces but always linked to a face & a whisper & a door slamming in the apartment upstairs & always the same door always the same breath always the same shadow that might be him or her or god or a noise pretending to be god & sometimes it’s painful not to die she says as if the syllables were a shield instead of a wound & she rocks herself to resist becoming entirely static & the flower beds rock too and shiver with the wind again

it was the age of gold which came first & of course it did it always does it’s always the first thing lost and the last thing mourned it’s the original mode of ecstasy outside of time before sickness before guilt & how else to describe it when it was not the event itself but the way it presses its shape into the wet clay of the present how it stains & resounds & reaches up through the floorboards in the hotel rooms in the churches in the movements of midnight traffic in the cry of some newborn that isn’t yours but could be & maybe was once in some other life

& there she always is in that reverie so distant to the days but so near to the nights & its Mother the woman who bore or beat or died but more than that the image the recollection the wound sheathed in pastel blue with eyes like iridescent unnamable seizures & face radiant with the colour of life yes the colour of life & the baby in her arms brother or christ or some amalgam of both a thing so still so small as to seem less real than plastic or porcelain & yet more potent than myself

& all this for what to fuse the incompatible to hold fire in the same hands that were made for gentling & so to become & to undo & to weave purity into the first threads of defilement until the garment of memory can no longer be worn without the itch and the weight & yes the love is there but it is cursed yes it is light but it burns & the memory returns again already ruined before it arrives because we’re seeing now the flush fade from her face her open wound soft & fated to never close just gape just glisten just weep & now everything is turning black in shade in saturation into the black that swallows the outlines of things & leaves only suggestion

& in that black the shape of her remaining & returning & revolving in the silhouette behind the veil always the same always seen through the eyes of a child still too new to know desire as distinct but already tethered already suspect and undone & the hallway comes back with its linoleum & its echo & the false candle flickering under the framed madonna in the foster home where belief was borrowed & she stood there golden edged halo stenciled in false permanence & the curves visible beneath the drapery & yes i noticed how my mind curled around it like a vine around a statue & like a naive young initiate i didn’t know why i just knew it mattered knew it meant something knew it was the same thing as all the other things i wasn’t allowed to say because it always is that way isn’t it it’s always the same shape the marble breast sculpted from the impossible absence to resemble love but frozen forever just before