for Meta Adamic

The sky is all colors, shapes.
Silent, like the painters in the studio;
the horses behave, keep still in their poses.
Everyone paints, or walks around barefoot,
checking what others have done with their canvases.
My friend remembers the hooved horses outside,
she saw them in a show, racing; she paints them still,
but moving in oil colors, Cerulean Blue, mixed with green.
The teacher couldn’t bring her a model today,
my friend doesn’t know
where a leg is to come out, where a head, a tail.
Her brush strokes over parts of bodies,
covering them, reincarnating them elsewhere.
Changing colors, poses, space — they enter each other’s
bodies, reproducing themselves over and over.
Maybe in the end she will see just grass,
and horses floating among the clouds.

Biljana D. Obradović
From her book Frozen Embraces
Cross-Cultural Communications, 1997

used with permission of the poet