Eyes connect to the brain by nerves. Brain to heart by veins
Sounds to ears by feet on stairs. Smells to nose through memory
Ions. Old wood. Candles just out

Your breath breathes centuries

A match in the dream is struck. The movement stirs up dust on a sill
The particles float and spread

One particle of dust is different, and ventures the four corners of the room
Its float has a movement all its own

It’s 1889, inside the room of a mental asylum in Saint-Remy, France. A painter
Named Vincent paints, it's what he does. Untitled stars in the night
He hallucinates. It's the glycoside taken for his epilepsy mixing
With the absinthium he drinks. The particle of dust lands in a fresh wet yellow
Star on his canvas. That's what it does. The yellow hardens
And the particle of dust becomes encased in the paint

One hundred twenty one years later, a woman named Eleven is standing
In front of the painting at a gallery in New York. Elements have withered
The paint down over time and the particle of dust becomes free
From the canvas it’s been trapped in

From the painting, the dust floats again

It goes out into the new air until it lands in a fold of Eleven’s sweater
Eleven is also is a painter, who’s never had a piece shown in public. Inspired
From the gallery, she goes home and paints. Then eats salmon.
It’s what she does. As she’s eating, the particle of dust floats out
From her sweater, lands on her fish, and is consumed

Eleven hallucinates, then goes back to her canvas, and paints an X-ray
Of her chest that was taken because a scalpel had been left there
When she had open-heart surgery. She calls the painting The Knife in My Heart
Amber in hue, with the silhouette of the scalpel melding into the shape of a shark

The Knife in My Heart goes on to hang in that same gallery in New York
Next to the Van Gogh, along with a collection she paints of other people’s
Forgotten, sewn in, X-rayed surgery tools melding into the shape of things:
Tweezers into a dragonfly’s wing, a bone-chisel into an M16 assault rifle
Forceps into a willow tree. The knife in her heart brings Eleven immeasurable
Wealth and happiness, that’s what it does

From one canvas-night-century breath to the next
Dust floats and non-jagged lines intertwine
Coloring in the creatures of occurrence such as this