Next poem is called "Self Portrait."
And in it, an older man, an old artist-- painter--
is speaking.
I got the idea from the poem from reading
just this gorgeous art historian, just
beautiful poetic, vigorous kind of prose.
His name is Élie Faure, F-A-U-R-E,
and he was a Frenchman.
And these were translated, but they were translated very well.
There's about five books.
And some of the anecdotes about painters,
especially about the painter, Velazquez, are from Élie Faure.
Just let me read you something.
This is an introduction to one of the books,
the book about modern art.
And it's just a little epigraph introduction to it.
He says, "I shall die.
Men live.
I believe in them.
Their adventure will come to an end
only with the adventure of the Earth.
And when the Earth is dead, it will, perhaps,
continue elsewhere.
It is only a moment of it that I have recounted in this book.
But every living moment contains the whole of life.
Whoever participates with confidence
in the adventure of men has his portion of immortality."
"Self Portrait."
"Certainly Velazquez saw these reflections.
The stained beards of saints after the God's death,
and the holes in their faces, declaring
how empty life can be before the end, with the tongues cut out,
the children already born.
Down the hill, in a savage monastery, my apprentice sits.
We haven't yet made our communion,
but he believes in me.
In the boredom of hard bread and the delicate roots
of his dinner, he says my name aloud to the walls.
Out his window, over red sand and stone,
a narrow stream of water makes its way.
That young man must have seen enough--
brilliant lights of the city at night, and the man
kissing himself in the yellow window on the hill.
It's me in the window, the model for this portrait.
I give myself shamelessly.
I showed the whole of my mouth, my genitals,
an entire Spanish landscape, snakes down my belly.
Still, we couldn't stop anyone from dying,
or the sensitive from going mad.
When Velazquez's coffin was opened,
two skeletons were found holding hands,
but the skulls had turned aside.
We live and die in the heart of each hour,
making refusals into art.
Our childhoods, pure hills of grape and wheat,
were unhappy and should have been left behind.
Our paintings were mirrors, glassy skin, nothing but light
in whose flame a moth twisted and burned.
Visions in the moist cafes, and nothing had to make sense.
We were honest, learning our craft,
but traded love for ambition, the way the poor trade seeds
from the garden for buttons.
The gossip said we went out too often
in our row boats, singing.
That we drank too much light.
Under the wide lindens, the heavy shadows
begin to spread their fruit.
Younger men will find in those shadows grace
in a green penumbra, out of which something mortal begins
to grow."
One great thing about writing a persona poem is you can act--
you can just say anything you want.
You can be any person, you can be snotty,
snooty, a little jaded like this old fellow is.