@3Hurry! Hurry!@1 Flames pour from the cottage window. The plane goes down to sea, and like a pelican scoops up a beakful of water, returns to the burning vision of a crucifixion which smells of the artist's linseed oil and the trapped mistress, his muse, who lives in his throat, content never to come out. I watch the pilot pour water into the artist's mouth and eyes, and through his red roof. Yellow fire eats the edges of his yard. The priest has come and is waving a giant candle at the anger of the artist in his spilled moonlight. Here too, an old peasant woman with nothing to hide and her junk cart, has brought sacks full of dead birds and rotten apples in the name of his color zone, as he requested but no longer needs. As I leave him, the artist is beating his way across the hillside with fire and smoke swimming from the rear of his musty brown suit. Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.cc.press.org | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...SAINT PATRICK by EDWIN MARKHAM TO W.P.: 1 by GEORGE SANTAYANA AFTER A LECTURE ON KEATS by OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES LAY OF THE TRILOBITE by MAY EMMA GOLDWORTH KENDALL IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY by THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH MEMORY by AMANDA LUELLA BARLOW |