Hell o insect,
excellent stuff - you're on a creative binge it seems to this humble reader.
may it last and last.
Cheers,
Frank
> Rembrandt's Angel
>
>'Large port and lemon' the angel said,
>stashing his wings behind the bench.
>Drink always loosens his tongue
>and stories rose like moths
>to dazzle against my ears.
>'Last night I dined with Rembrandt.'
>he said 'The old boy told me
>that if he went back, he'd be a poet,
>not a painter.
>
>I told him there aren't enough words
>for all the earths he used,
>the brown shades and ambers
>shading into umber.
>Those flat winter afternoons
>melting as evening treacles
>into huddled corners. Light
>your lamps and candles but darkness
>shoulders in with bruised eyes.
>
>His only full-grown child, a son,
>died at twenty-three, consumed
>by the world, and afterwards
>he celebrated, year by year,
>all the small deaths in a face,
>lined loss and laughter, busy
>as village wakes, and always
>under the skin, a festival
>of bones.
>
>Why did he want to be a poet?
>Simple, words cost so little,
>a goose-quill ink and paper
>would supply all he needed.
>Instead he beggared himself
>on the pigments, lapis, carmine,
>cinnabar, gamboge, hues
>from the huge open-arsed world,
>precious and poisonous, he ground
>and mixed them as an alchemist,
>gilded canvasses with colour
>
>but the round gold was slow rolling in.
>The grey wolf was at the door,
>howling with the bastard bailiffs.
>Remember times when he laid
>golden fruit thick on his easel
>but ached for a loaf of bread
>and the holes in his stockings big
>like biscuits and potato-cakes.
>
>So he said yes, next time
>he'd use words not paints,
>because the application
>of it all became too much,
>the struggle with brushes
>as if he were wrestling a wild hog
>to its knees for the bristles,
>or the sables turning on him
>with sharp snug fangs and
>driving him to bed hungry
>and dissatisfied, eyes puffy
>and belly a-grumble like small coal
>in a scuttle.
>
>Buy me another port and I'll tell you
>about Milton wanting to paint.'
>I remarked that his usual tipple
>resembled a sick man's piss.
>He raised the glass to the light
>until it winked, and said
>'Ah, Pasteur, now...'
>
> grasshopper
The Tales of Faust poetry page can be found at:
http://www.hotkey.net.au/~flp/F_index.htm
_________________________________________________________________
MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos:
http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx
|