Repost: Poem: Hockney at Bellevue . . . "the promise of love's eternal blank comfort"

Hockney at Bellevue 

There’s all kinds of ways to 

enter one of 

Hockney’s pools, 

to part the cerulean acrylic, 

become California, 

no longer dream young men 

in radiant absence but 

engage perfections of skin 

and promise of

love eternal’s blank comfort, 

including this way, in winter 

3,000 miles away and 

over a sludge of feta and 

fries, 

indistinct life's landscape 

not thrilled with 

its inability to be simply 

necessary (without 

a pallid cuisine of industrial 

vistas, no inside, no 

 

hospital, no chance to see 

humanity restored by 

experts reconstructing 

pools of human flesh). 

 __________ 

Sarah Sarai, pub. in Parthenon West Review, 2010.

Collected in That Strapless Bra in Heaven (Kelsay Books), 2020.