ON REFRAMING A PICTURE PAINTED BY MY SISTER

At least no merchant traffics in my heart.
Pictor Ignotus                  

Lent to a friend long ago, to celebrate
Its return we chose to renew the frame,
The original cheap, no grace to the painting,
Now falling apart. Back from the framer
Drawing it gently out of the package,
The strong colours suddenly revived
Glow upon us. And looking again
At this woman reclining, whose figure
On one side merges with a heavenly light
Pouring down upon her, on the other seems
Comfortably propped upon a resilient darkness,
We behold a life resurgent, a life we’d lost
Revived.
                  Gazing, glad of this small success,
I remember the struggle every painting
Was to her; and not just the craft, not just
Every art’s perhaps impossible task
Of getting the surface right, but more
The effort of allowing the divisions in us
To speak justly of each other. That
The task she set herself. And the question
You may ask is, did she succeed, were
Her pictures good? And because her work
Never drew an audience wider or warmer
Than her friends, then you might say
She did not succeed—though in that word
I hear the murmur of the merchant’s mind.
      But if an honest question asked in faith
Not trusting the professional eye nor my own
This I’ve always found my constant answer:
There are paintings of hers that I would like
To hang forever in my house, paintings
That ask the difficult questions we avoid,
Paintings that speak of a power sometimes
Silent in us, which when like music working
Gladden the substance of our being,
Body and soul dancing together.
      And as we delight in the graceful motions of a body,
So in the surface and complexion of a painting
We must feel first an unquestioned pleasure
In what we see. If then we find a power infused
Through all the parts, the light and dark in us
Briefly reconciled, the hint of something
We might call life, why should we say anything
But this picture is good, here is success?
      And if we can find it only occasionally
In all her work, must we then think
Nothing of the rest? No, let me remember
That every time she set about her painting
She made it an act of life, an act
Which once we might’ve called an invocation
A kind of prayer, an act through which
She hoped to order the disparate forces
We are subject to, out of what singular
May be dark in us, or a dessicated light,
She sought a world of being now;
And though this frequent rehearsal of her task
Rarely ended with a painting she believed in
Yet each visiting of the easel was an act
By which she would’ve made her world ours.
      And because the future always has neglected
All but a name or two, and often honoured those
More in name than knowledge of their work,
For all of us some kind of slighting
Lies ahead: when we are gone, our children too,
A future generation, clearing out
The house from which we have departed
May be faced with this familiar painting
And wonder what to do: liking the frame
Perhaps, but not the picture, they discard the one
And keep the other; and thus the accolade
Survives its object, as someone will keep
The manuscript box my father made me
Chucking out the dusty poems they find there.
And though the work of most of us awaits
A bonfire, skip or dustbin, or will lie
Unread in distant libraries, I know
I should not think, as I often do,
That the sad epitome of a wasted life
Is the long struggle to produce a poem
Very few will read. Rather, let me remember
That the pictures I am so glad to have
Were made in conditions much the same,
That the discipline of fame is that of failure,
And time wasted is time not spent here,
From where I know I can dismiss whatever
Temptations and distractions come my way
And free those powers that are in me still.