Mike’s Painting

 

Mike flambéed his paintings –

Summoning petrol saints and smoke in broken alleys

police would stop and stare

not caring for his permit; learning from his flaming art

how far and deep an artist carves

a soul

to keep a brain at bay.

 

He’d layer paint in trowel slabs and

stab

with brushes, pushing rainbows

over rainbows,

mushing torrent-flows of oozy oils, loosely toiled

into rough gilt

 

He’d capture Echo’s worlds in swirls and trap the abstract pulse of life;

the secrets lying rich behind the dreary here and now:

 

the silent scaffold

 

power towering through his talent onto easelled blocks.

 

If anyone could capture love, or trap the seas or strip thin a breeze from a wind

it was him:

the light magician

fighting to forge everything from nothing –

seeing all and painting over writings on walls.

 

*

 

And so Westmorland coursed its way forward

called him to draw it, forced through its squally rawness, broad and coarse as gutted gorse

he saw it, fought and caught it;

tamed it

lay it exhausted on drawing board floor.

 

He drank water and wine whilst chalking lines:

a feint white life breathing through canvas.

 

He harnessed life

like transfusing Galatea’s muse from the ether to one fixed view:

 

a truth

 

receding in hues of coal greens and Ariel blues:

lost fields

rabid waters

cracked sunrise moors

 

nearly distant,

under-flown by

a phoenix.