An Artist
"That man's silences were marvellous to listen to." — Thomas Hardy "Under The Greenwood Tree."
I
"Out of pure moonshine have I fashioned
the grammar of your silences,"
a sculptor once professed to me
who sculpted presence out of absence.
His art was one of perfect meanness,
profound as it was non-existent:
the way he smiled, the way he wept,
the way he wiped his feet on silence.
He taught the moon to shine more bright,
the sun to weep, the clouds to smile.
He taught the very stars to dream:
he was a dancer who breathed outwards
the way a flower breathes deeply in
because the stars are hard to fathom.
II
"Out of pure moonshine have I fashioned
what some would say's unfashionable
but I have proved them wrong—with skill—
because to do so is my passion,"
he also blurted out, when pressed
more intimately and exactly:
he was as proud as he was humble
and he was sometimes not my guest.
But mostly he was quite at home
among my slaves and artefacts
and liked to dream of languages
made perfect by love's intuition
as sometimes he preferred to roam
beyond the scope of God's ambition.
How to "Get a Life"
"Every time a thing is possessed
It vanishes." — Brian Patten.
Just for one moment glimpsed, and then relinquished
—delicious face, soft hands, bright eyes, slim waist—
a butterfly upon the breeze, or shadow
in shadeless water scurrying by, a wraith
no wraith could have invented, barely there,
a path, through mist, towards that final sunset
or, through those woods, towards sleep's pleasant hills:
I too have reached out for that timeless present.
I too have moved through terraces of sunlight
and brushed truth to one side, with hand, or hankie,
or pushed back overhanging branches, till
a face appeared, in that specific ocean
where once a naiad leapt, or slept, or crept,
but then was gone more quickly than time stinted.
John H. B. Martin is a poet who lives in London, England. He is a graduate of London University and Australia National University and has been writing for many decades. He has written four novels and is working on a fifth. His magnum opus is a six-volume epic poem. Most of his work is yet to be published.