The Whitest Of White Canvases Poem by Alexandre Nodopaka

I crossed many tides and rode funeral
coaches until twenty years ago.
From that hearse they switched me to
another and another and then another.

The last one is even smaller than the ones
I came from: Polyhymnia, Thalia, Urania,
Tersichore, Melpomene, Eutorpe, Erato,
Clio, Calliope no longer charmed nor

appealed to me. I rode them, groaning
with my pains, searching
for the ultimate artwork but the salts
and monsters of the oceans ate through

my paint brushes. Nor any canvas was
sturdy enough to contain ordinary nature.
I mistakenly searched for what did not
exist nor could ever be created.

Everything was a fleeting figment
of my fleeting imagination
in a fleeting world in constant motion.