If you ask him he will talk for hours- <br />how at fourteen he hammered signs, fingers <br />raw with cold, and later painted bowers <br />in ladies' boudoirs; how he played checkers <br />for two weeks in jail, and lived on dark bread; <br />how he fled the border to a country <br />which disappeared wars ago; unfriended <br />crossed a continent while this century <br />began. He seldom speaks of painting now. <br />Young men have time and theories; old men work. <br />He has painted countless portraits. Sallow <br />nameless faces, made glistening in oil, smirk <br />above anonymous mantelpieces. <br />The turpentine has a familiar smell, <br />but his hand trembles with odd, new palsies. <br />Perched on the maulstick, it nears the easel. <br /> <br />He has come to like his resignation. <br />In his sketch books, ink-dark cossacks hear <br />the snorts of horses in the crunch of snow. <br />His pen alone recalls that years ago, <br />one horseman set his teeth and aimed his spear <br />which, poised, seemed pointed straight to pierce the sun.<br /><br />Erica Jong<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-artist-as-an-old-man-2/
