If you ask him, he will talk for hours
how at fourteen he hammered signs,
fingers raw with cold, and later painted bowers
in ladies' boudoirs; how he played checkers
for two weeks in jail, and lived on bread;
how he fled the border to a country
which disappeared wars ago; unfriended
crossed a continent while this country
began.

He seldom speaks of painting now.
Young men have time and theories;
old men work.
He has painted countless portraits.
Sallow nameless faces, made glistening in oil,
smirk above anonymous mantelpieces.
The turpentine has a familiar smell,
but his hand trembles with odd, new palsies.
Perched on the maul-stick, it nears the easel.

He has come to like this resignation.
In his sketch books, ink-dark cassocks hear
the snorts of horses in the crunch of snow.
His pen alone recalls that years ago,
one horseman set his teeth and aimed his spear
which, poised, seemed pointed straight
to pierce the sun.