Gary LeBel

What it Wants

When I crept into her room, she was sleeping.  Night’s fingers had closed the curtains. Having lost our father not two days before, she’d cried herself to sleep.

And just as the Tahitian girl had lain in Gauguin’s famous painting, her hands lay palms-down on the pillow, her legs crossing lightly at her ankles. With her face lost in a storm of hair, she looks far younger than forty-six. Death, too, sits nearby in a chair at the foot of the bed. It smiles vaguely up at me and nods in her direction. Somehow I know what it wants, and so I leave. From outside the door, I can hear the room rearrange itself, changing the present into the past as my sister sleeps on with all the unwitting indolence of a girl a third of her age . . .

	and everything’s lost (and found)
	in the moment between 
		what was
	and is
		no longer.

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About the Author

Gary LeBel is an artist-poet living in the greater Atlanta area whose poems have appeared in journals throughout the USA, the UK, Japan, and India. He believes that art, or anything else worth doing, is a life-long pilgrimage.

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