I wrote this while on a research trip to Madrid in January with Julie ( www.juliebeugin.com ), there was an Ingres Exhibition at the Prado.  I paced around the exhibition haunting it with many visits.  There were no pictures allowed.  I was inspired to write the folowing description of a painting I enjoyed called “Dream of Ossian”:

Seeing the dream of Ossian.

 A soft and wavering warmth wafes and expands into the depths of the cool dark realm of slumber. The coldness is weaved into the shadowed softness of so many half remembered characters.

A spear is softly cleaves the realm and echoes upon the neck of a warrior fading into the nothing distance. Those who are forlorn and lost gaze down upon the slumbering poet.

A compassionate hand lays open and ready to receive the reconstituted consciousness. And yet there is only the numbness of folded arms that cradle the thoughts of the silently resonant musician.

Two hounds look upward awake and aware of that stillness of timeless wisdom.

There firmly stands the threatening pose. A firm and determined grip. He is above ready to strike. The shield hides him, protecting him like a hollow shadow. The mist is hard and heavy as marble.
Fine slivers of light precisely define so many emergent expressions. They merge together around under the cloak of a grey face. Is that a kitten, or is that a figment in the clouds I see? The songs play unheard with a desperate swiftness. Have we lost the battle? Perhaps we have as all that has come recedes into the dusty blue darkness itself collapsing into a grey vacuum that hovers at the vanishing point of some unheralded surface of unreality. 

That which cannot replicated must be remembered and held fast as a poem for renewal.