On the Forgotten Artist

Yes, the child has watched you huddled on your stool,

A little too long. Some foreign spirit dreams

Your extinction, playing on disappointments, fears,

Commands your threads of desire to flow like streams

Into a final orgiastic pool

Or on to a silent spool

That weaves your star to hide in hemispheres

Unemployed and still.

The child’s face is ductile, and his will,

And the awakening passion of generation.

Your shape, your painting, are communicate

Forever to the hierarchy and vision

Of life running in sparks but immutable.

The child’s heart is all

A hiding of colours in corners, the green, the slate,

Bent for eternity.

The same for all manhood’s face so vast and sly,

Lips sticky from sweetmeats, dirty chubby hands

Engrossed with a thousand toys and crying after

New stirrings of sense, new visages for his lands.

He has fixed upon your passion, you multiply

In his serene yellow eye.

If your dream became death it is squelched in heavy laughter

And bellowings of life.

And so with earth, the aged but still lovely wife.

Her face too is ductile: you shaped it with the vow

Of youth, mountain and boscage in cameo

And hackneyed shoreline. She is altered now

By you forever: time foams with his knife:

Survival is old strife:

Come through attritions, days, nights, to the low

-Slung planet and sit

With child, man, earth, among all the infinite.