Mari Sánchez Cayuso

Tag: watercolor

  • Harbor

    Harbor | Charcoal

    Watched a man bluefish near shore
    and called him my friend

    Not because I knew him deeply
    but because loneliness sends strange signals across water
    and sometimes another lonely thing answers

    He drifted there beyond the tide line
    half man—half sea
    moving through the dark current
    like a ship that had spent too many years
    navigating storms alone

    And I thought about love then

    How women often stand at the shoreline
    wanting arrival

    Wanting something that docks fully
    Something that lowers its anchor honestly
    Something that says
    here I am
    I am no longer drifting

    But some men love like the sea itself

    Harbor | Charcoal | Watercolor

    They come close in waves
    Retreat quietly
    Return again under different weather

    Not because they feel nothing

    Because they feel too much
    and fear what happens
    when a heart finally reaches harbor

    So they remain partly offshore
    close enough to see the lanterns burning
    close enough to hear tenderness calling from land
    yet unwilling to surrender
    their last route of escape

    And women

    women become lighthouse keepers in these loves

    Faithful
    Exhausted
    Standing in terrible weather
    trying to interpret distant signals correctly

    Was that warmth?
    Was that love?
    Was that merely loneliness
    passing briefly through the harbor again?

    The fish-tail made sense to me then

    Because some people belong partly to deep water

    Partly to solitude
    Partly to longing

    They want intimacy
    the way sailors want shore after months at sea

    desperately
    romantically
    and with absolutely no idea
    how to live there peacefully once they arrive

    Still, there was gentleness in him

    The tide carried him softly as though even the ocean understood
    how exhausting it is
    to spend a lifetime torn
    between closeness and freedom

    To be continued

  • Cageless

    I no longer dream
    of extraordinary things

    Not anymore

    Becoming . .
    “Bruised Peaches & Old Paintings”

    I dream of a quiet kitchen at dawn

    I dream of open windows
    A slow walk at dusk
    beneath a sky turning the color
    of bruised peaches and old paintings

    Watercolor | Charcoal

    I want less noise now
    Less performance
    Less of this endless human habit
    of proving we are worthy of being loved

    What I want now is simple
    and therefore sacred

    A sink full of dishes after dinner

    The soft weight of my sleeping cats in sunlight

    Music drifting through the house at midnight

    And love
    if it finds me again
    must arrive gently

    No grasping hands
    No crowded silences
    No love that mistakes possession for intimacy

    I want someone calm enough
    to sit beside my quiet
    without trying to translate it

    Someone who understands
    that my space

    my art, my time
    the invisible interior life of me, has always been cageless

    Not distant
    Not cold

    Simply alive in quiet ways

    Like birds disappearing into evening trees

    Like moonlight moving freely across the floor

    Like poems arriving at 2 a.m.
    asking for nothing except room to breathe

    Because after all these years
    I think love should feel less like fire
    and more like light from another room

    soft, steady, enduring

    the kind that lets you remain fully yourself
    while never letting you forget
    you are deeply—gently
    not alone

  • Held

    God is in the wrist
    no, before the wrist
    in that small electric yes
    that happens before I move

    Pencil

    I sit with paper like a woman with too many thoughts

    He says nothing

    Which is how I know it’s Him

    Then—a line

    It goes crooked on purpose

    Leans into green

    Like it’s remembering a forest

    I’ve never seen but somehow miss

    I try to fix it
    He laughs in sunlight

    Watercolor

    Yellow breaks open
    right through the middle of my doubt

    Splits it clean, spills everywhere

    He guides like that
    Not neat
    Not polite

    Not asking if I’m ready just pushing light
    through whatever part of me is still resisting being seen

    My hand follows
    like it’s been waiting its whole life to stop pretending it knows where it’s going —with one drop of color

    Watercolor

    I didn’t plan that reach
    I didn’t plan anything

    That’s the miracle

    God is not in the finished piece

    God is in the ruin of control

    In the moment I let the brush wander and it doesn’t get lost

    He was never waiting
    at the end

    He was in every mark
    I almost didn’t make

    The Woodlands, Texas

  • Omissions III

    you don’t say it
    but it rides shotgun anyway

    Held in Omissions (watercolor)

    window down, elbow out, that quiet between us doing all the talking like a highway that forgot where it was going

    you ever notice that?

    how a thing can live
    without ever being born just pacing the inside of your chest like a stray that found the door
    but won’t come in

    that’s us

    Held in Omissions (watercolor)

    you trim the truth
    like a man shaving in bad light

    leave just enough shadow to look like something real

    and I sit there—feeling the weight of it

    I become a sound you almost say and then don’t—and it echoes louder than if you had

    that’s where I live with you

    in the almost
    in the inch before contact
    in the breath you take
    right before you decide not to cross it

    and it’s not that you don’t feel it

    I’ve seen it
    in the way your voice slows down
    like it’s trying not to wake something up

    in the way you stay too long for a man who’s just passing through

    you linger like a question you already know the answer to
    but won’t ask

    and me

    I let it happen
    I let the silence build a house around us
    no doors
    no windows
    just walls made of everything we won’t admit

    funny thing is
    it feels warm in there

    safe, almost

    until it doesn’t

    until you leave
    and the air changes
    and I’m standing in the middle of something
    that never had a name

    Held in Omissions (watercolor)

    trying to explain to myself how something so present can still be missing

    how a man can hold you
    without ever really touching you

    how omission
    quiet, careful, deliberate omission

    can feel more intimate
    than truth

    and here’s the part that stays

    not you
    you go, you always go
    back to the life that has edges, definitions, doors that close

    but this—this unfinished thing this almost this sentence that refuses its period

    it lingers

    in the coffee cup you didn’t finish
    in the chair that still leans toward me
    in the air that remembers the shape of your voice

    and I

    I finally see it for what it is

    not love
    not absence

    but a corridor

    long, dim, echoing
    where we met halfway
    and decided
    without saying it

    to never reach the end