The Artist

The Artist

In the heat of the summer, the blizzards of winter,
The days of your marriages, funerals, feasts,
I wait, for a faint, never-heard-before ringing
To pierce my black boredom—a sudden relief.

Hush now, it comes. And with ice-cold attention
I wait here to seize, overpower, and to slay.
As—spinning out under my sharp-eyed expectance—
The tenuous thread shudders on and away ...

A wind from the sea? Or fair birds of good omen
Sing in the leaves? Or time—stopped at last?
Or is it a fluttering snowstorm of blossom
Shook down from the trees? Or an angel flown past?

Hour upon hour—world significance bearing,
The sounds ever broadening, movement and light.
Past locked with the Future—eye to eye staring.
The present—as nothing. Regret—put to flight.

Then, at the last, on the brink of conception
Of forces unguessed and a world newly made—
The poet is struck by the old malediction ...
His reason intensifies then kills it dead.

I build a cold cage to enclose in captivity
My light-feathered bird that was all joy and liberty.
The bird who was trying to draw the grave’s sting.
The bird who came flying, salvation to bring.

Here is my cage—see, the steel bars are heavy,
But they gleam like pure gold in the evening glow.
There in his ring sits the bird—once so merry—
And sings by the window and rocks to and fro.

The wings have been clipped and the song sung—so often.
Does it please you to stand by the sill in the sun?
The songs give you pleasure? But I, in exhaustion,
>Wait, bored as before, for a new one to come.