Everything begins with Elsa, sitting in the shape of days. Elsa was August, the reoccurring memory held captive within a summer month.

Sitting in her kitchen I watch as her form glistens in the freckled way the sun passes through the curtains; the crimson curve of her vibrant lips, her hips which fall into her thighs. Naked, she leans against a wall. Like drops of rain her breasts fall from her shoulders. Her charm is in the disinterested words she has not yet spoken; she speaks in a broken verse- between the distance of each syllable there exists the shade of her love. Elsa, I say, and she stops me, falls into the chair across the table, lays her toes atop mine as the smoke lifts gracefully from the ashtray, dissipates above her amber waves of hair.

In a moment we will have danced into the bedroom, to the mattress in the cove of her apartment; the waterfall of dreams- the subtle sound of the distant water makes its way through the window. I kiss her neck; the unfinished oil portrait of the recently deceased, vanishing into the oval history of her eyes.

She remains a mystery to me but it is her portrait I wish to paint, that others may come and see her lying upon the divan, marveling at her imagination.