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On the Day His Lease Expired
by Earl Coleman

The white so carefully incised, not only separated from but by the dark,
his daring fingers fashioning that fusion, fission, fractioning the whole
in parts but only to make whole again, a god in worn-out dungarees,
reordering the universe of dark and light with huge paint-dappled hands
occasionally mindful, cellful of the cancer gnawing patient at his gut,
slowed now by radiation, separating light of this creation on the
drafting table, here beneath the sun-filled skylight, from the dark
of pain, the empty canvas willing to be used like molten gases in their
nullity, just waiting for the revelation of his word defining light and dark.