Wow! This is powerful. I would not dream to find a fault if one indeed
existed. Regards Arthur.
----- Original Message -----
From: "grasshopper" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, September 29, 2002 9:03 PM
Subject: New sub: Rembrandt's Angel


>         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