As if canvas had been caressed,
stroked,
enveloped
in a kind of charisma,
cloaked in a garb that Joseph would have pleasured,
this he had conceived
and brought
through all stages of execution
almost
before
we were aware
of the accomplishment.
Held altogether
by a force
whose lightness
suggested a kind of antigravity,
his touch was casual, moreover,
as one’s grasp of a friend’s shoulder,
neither poured, like a gallon of heartbeats,
into some wild, wet splatter,
nor a Pollack-like panache: free formed, psychedelic;
but rather, in runs,
all swept like a river,
those mellow, yellow, and rampant red juxtapositions,
a touch so definitive: so right-here-and-now,
yet ready to stretch
beyond its limitations, its dissatisfaction of boundaries,
until even you and I could tell
it was completed.
Thus it was Francis Bacon
about whom it was declared, “he’s the one that paints
those nice men and women.”
But now
he was old, and senile, his mind
had wandered as far as Ulysses’; he would forget to eat,
but painted continuously. Sometimes,
at night, he was found, dysphasically
conversing, as if with a glowing image he had created.
He did not appear to be disturbed
by our presence,
not even aware, I think, of our existence. He would smile,
wave familiarly at the canvas.
His arm, his brush, and the paints,
were one organ, all articulated. Everything
we had known he was had been stripped
exclusive of that bare essential.
Common, banal humanity had been extinguished;
but the artist
lingered. If led to his bed
he would lie, stare at the ceiling,
at the walls, with an inarticulate anxiety,
as if they were a canvas,
as if they were a ready-to-paint Sistine Chapel.
He would sleep. The paint would dry.
Another picture. Pure line and color. How did he do it?
Sometimes thought plays second fiddle.
But nothing lasts forever not even sunlight.