The portrait hangs where dust gathers slow,
In corridor twilight, half-lit and low—
A face unblinking behind glass that breathes
With the hush of curtains and the hush of eaves.
Eyes like wells of varnished night,
Mirrors that swallow candlelight,
They keep the hours between two ticks,
Counting secrets in the floorboards’ ticks.
The frame remembers hands gone cold,
Carved with names the tongue won’t hold;
Paint peels like memory from bone,
A smile stitched to a windless moan.
At midnight the wallpaper leans and listens,
The house inhales and darkness christens
Each footstep into softer air,
Each whisper braided with its stare.
Sometimes the portrait tilts its head
When rooms declare the living dead;
Sometimes a lock of painted hair
Unthreads itself into the stair.
It knows the rhythm of abandoned clocks,
The lullaby of shuttered knocks,
It knows the shape of absence well—
A hollow where a heart once fell.
If you pass beneath that patient gaze,
Feel how the past loops through its maze;
The portrait keeps the house awake,
Breeding echoes no dawn can break.
Listen: the hush becomes a sound—
A breath, a name, a hollowed ground—
And in that frame, forever sealed,
A ghost keeps vigil, unrevealed.
THE LONELY WHITE WOLF 