Before chancing upon the fire, the artist
had spent a drear twelvemonth in the forest –
times, he’d later say, of the utmost despondency;
of dragging his forked easel day after day
like a schoolboy with a weighty satchel
to the coarse hide woven out of mud and wattles
where no creature of interest caught his eye.
He’d send, daily, his new man out to spy
with clear instructions as to what he wanted,
and every day, with his flat feet planted
like griddle irons upon the teeming earth,
the man (where do they get them?, he’d curse)
at every brown mole and scutty badger
would erect cupped hands and bellow Master!
A catch! in his well-trained, institutional voice.
Many a dark hour questioning his choice
the foiled great spent amongst the stinging nettles:
he dwelt much upon the running battles
he had fought with the City & Artists’ Guild
(what had been their precise turn of expression?
Sir, your project is a digression
from the path of learning: we cannot spare
good students to you, for you waste their skills).
Then there was his chosen setting – what spoor
had led him to this sparse copse on the crown
of a hill that sat between two spurting towns
where soot belched arrogant from the chimney breasts?
And what had drawn him on this fool’s quest
in the first place – were the city right to shake him?
At times, he began to doubt his very vocation.
Then came the day of the fire. The student
had spent the morning cataloguing rodents –
Master! A vole. Master! A stoat. Master! –
so he’d sent him off into the blue azure,
a child’s toy bow and arrow on his back
and strict orders for him not to attack
anything moving – ‘Shoot it at the plane trees’.
The student went obediently,
bent-kneed and ridiculous in city garb,
his big head jutting forth in concentration
like a sweet apple on the stalk of the crab;
the artist stayed on listless at his station.
Master! A sparrow. Master! A fox – fleet,
but plumb perfect in his lineaments.
The voice wavering across a great expanse.
He must have nodded off. Sketches of plants –
half-finished and surreally tainted –
lay smouldering in his lap; the student,
sprawling a few lengths from him, had fainted,
the bow and arrow gleaming by his side.
The choked air was thick with animal cries:
above, snipe, gunning like bullets, went
twanging in confused volleys into the trees;
the other beasts were making for the valleys.
Everything was motion, instinct, terror.
The artist readied his materials,
shifted his weight. They came slowly at first,
setting one threat against the other
(clear danger in the cover of the dell
with what was bound to follow from exposure).
Boughs fell; irresolute, they held their ground.
A stump-headed lion bulled dully around,
looking for his clean-limbed lioness
(her neat ears, her snub nose, charm of wetness);
the artist watched her slope off to the side.
A sleuth of frog-legged bears scuttling by
(Frog? Or were they more like an echidna’s?)
passed under the flight path of a bat-come-pigeon
which held the artist with mistrustful eyes.
And then, at last, the semi-humanised
(the birds he could never approach right –
their fine-boned strangeness, their dolorous flight.
He ended blacking them in with charcoal,
though that, reader, is one to have and hold,
that you take with you to the other life):
you can see it in their faces – the strife,
the shame. Look at the little saddleback.
How he walks unwilling from the burning track
and out into the harshness of the world.
Look at the sad, pretty doe, so woman-eyed.
The artist sat among the flames. He sighed.
He looked on, with his finished sketches furled
beside him, as the cretinous student paused,
released blank arrows at the rump of a bull.
He watched as the bull proffered an expert heel.
Then he started on the road into town
his keen nose hot on the scent of reputation.
The student, he wrote off as a lost cause.