Museum Reverie

Sculpted muses circle in dance
celebrating spring perhaps or love.
It's so often about love.

Creating shadows,
illusions so beguiling
I dissolve into them.

Shadow sides of sculpture
intrigue now
far more than their stone progenitors.

This after I discovered
Rodin's disembodied spirits
hovering on a wall in the Legion of Honor.

My mother in her final illness
studied the shadows
of tree branches swaying on her ceiling.

We learned together what shadows
could teach, that we walk in light and shadow,
shadow and light.

I watch as phantom giants
slide off their pedestal, gray becoming
the color of creation.