The Beholder

The adage goes the beholder

will determine

what is glorious.

The line of shine/penumbra

on our evening’s ghostly orb;

how the craters take on depth we

never notice in the day. Everyone else

is focused on the stop of

coagulated red.

Your eyes are never more lovely

as when they’re fastened.

Spirited, stirring worlds 

beneath your lids

while you are dreaming.

I tell the tour guide that

Rodin was overrated. The

rock had been the master

throughout his chiselling of The Kiss.

Just ask Camille Claudel.

A straitjacket in

the end her magnum opus.

His gasp when I leave the

group to gaze at rusted

bathroom fixtures.

The scrawling on the stalls.

How the daisy is more alluring

once it’s plucked. What else has

the answer to love?

Then the daughter whose limbs

are severed after shelling, ferried

by her mother who is scaling

newborn crags in her chador,

brushed the hue of blood that’s not

her own, the way it mimics

Gaugin when in the light.

How she wails when they are

laid beside the torso. An aria

that evokes

Maria Callas. If the dead

can not have beauty

then who can?

Andreas Gripp

January 13, 2026

RF Photo