Curate's Egg by David Whelan

 EGGS in the PAN look almost green in the afternoon light. It was supposed to be morning but the clock didn’t stop. Scrambled by the wedding rings, kissing unused and rusted on the countertop. They stopped wearing them ever since he told her how he's getting the eggs. ‘Can you give me a hand in here, please?’ he says. The kettle needs to be boiled.
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and rueful peeks at the alarm clock.
Horns bleat somewhere in the curtained distance.
Those town criers bellow news to a somnolent brain.
Eyes cemented closed with a.m.’s dream glue,
the clinkety-clank of an aging body dressed Sir Gawain’s armor
rustily wakes and empties Lethe and dreams into wakefulness.
Feet flop like pimpled pancakes ready for turning to the cold floor.

I was trying to paint the river; I'd taken myself, wind biting, sky sharp, along a route moving west out of the city. My heart sang a small homecoming each time I crossed the flagstone, the cloud-watched expanse of the Cour Carré; a delighted smile, welled up slow from my chest as the open arms of the Institut de France waved welcome across the water, the day bright blinding through the archway against the dark of the stone corridor. And yet despite the ephemeral brilliance gifted the sky by the gloom on that morning, when I emerged squint-blinking into the light to walk down to the riverbank, were water and the clouds the same winter-wrought dishwater grey.