It no longer excites us, moves us
for we are glaciers now, melting
much faster than we are moving…

so beauty in a broken
and breaking world
kneels at our feet

to wash them

and gets ground to powder,
and seems to disappear in
this indifferent static minute.

Yet, Beauty has this power
to arrest us just because
the beautiful’s conducive

to stillness,
to pause,
to hushed breath.

Beauty can make us exist,
different, as tho it’s for
just this stillness only

that we exist, persist in, gripped
by brute cold experience…
freezing, thawing, unfreezing,

blooming into longing, warming
splashing into wet participation
leaving us aching, deeply aching

for the power of beauty…for Beauty is

untouched by our involvement
or indifference, for it can
simply leave us with

the empty ache emerging
in deep unique strange moments
or unsuspecting times…

and those moments
when beauty is neither
pleasant nor pretty,

but haunting?
What of this, the
grinding ache of beauty

thawing in the interplay
between its presence
and its absence?