A black horse hangs fixed on a white wall she is ill, gone wild. It is Spring, past starlight in Sackville below an elaborate cobweb of clouds. A wild horse gallops towards the steamy light to a sleepless train. In minutes the broken mare will die again - With a kind of beauty that invades our dreams colliding each morning on waking alone in the dark, lower lip quivering against the passage of light.

I ask them to take the model, hold her up by candle light like a white rose with a pink blush a Sufi image in bloom, of the lover and his beloved. Caress across each mound and valley, kiss every hollow of her navel, highlight all contours of her skin. I want them strolling across the garden of secrets by star light like a heaving lover, his heart pulsing moonlight Before Goya's La Maja desnuda, Tiziano's Venus of Urbino. But all they want to do is frame elegance beside flowers pile beauty on beauty with plumb lines, model likeness bloodless. Like the face of some mannequin behind dirty glass on a vacant street by the Left Bank cluttered in plastic, flowers pointing this way and that.

Booming thunder and blackened brimstone from the Old Testament kept his breath almost in melody with a mild nap on a rainy afternoon, Sunday as Father Francis recited his famous sermon on Eve's original sin. Can't remember a thing except Grandpa's snore under a stained glass light inhaling and exhaling the Mickey Mouse tie we gave on his ninetieth fluttering, keeping the beat to Father's thumping on the new acrylic lectern. Even when a light touch and a deep sigh in the clarity of communion failed to keep him awake.

With the bell I dismiss my class. The quiet one, Ben Suk Lee who sits third row down, hovers at my desk when all elbows stampede to lunch out the door gives a polite bow, almost in need of forgiveness for bending the ground rules of our class in his new land of opportunity. With careful, slow, spaced, broken English he pulls out his gift from a worn Wal-Mart plastic bag, a smart-brown small-brim Fedora. A token of appreciation, a weeks savings from his part-time job in the family 7/11 corner store. Almost apologetic he bows, softly mouthing, May 15, Teacher Day, in Korea, gift for you, to thank my Sensei. I return the bow, read pride sincerity in his eyes. He leaves me standing there feeling my thirty years in education.

It might interest you to know Michelangelo loved Lo Stinco a roast veal shin dish he relished while working in Carrara at dusk, after clouds of dusty marble passed over his aching shoulders, neck his eyes glazed over the slow roasting shin in Vermentino white wine, bay leaves, juices, hunger carving directly into his favorite meal wedging a knife like a stone pitching tool and the four teeth of his fork scraping like an Auriou claw sucking marrow from bone and ever so delicately rotating in the mind's eye his terribilità how to tackle David's left shin at sunrise

You could tell they were married. Silence between them heavy - like a coffin lowered nightly. He sliced blue-rare steak with bobs and weaves catapulting ox-blood red on the tongue. The wife raked salad, Julienned dark leafy china, stabbing edges organizing greens to the familiar sigh of candlelight assembling an exacting order of a once sunny home as though she could harvest long forgotten tenderness, chewable words to ward off the hurl of fate, the blur of blue, the black embrace, loneliness that ushered them here to celebrate.