A nameless hand dwelt where the ink and margins bend,
beyond the court, beyond the gilded name;
he walked the pale, uncelebrated end
of streets that never learned to speak his fame
and in that hush
he heard the world begin to turn in light.
The patrons came in velvet, slow of tread,
to praise the painted ease of polished lies;
soft queens that never suffered, never bled,
rose flawless under merchant-sated eyes
while all things true
were softened into pleasing, shallow view.
But he would kneel where pigment first is born,
in crushed earth-ground of mineral and trace;
and sought a colour, pure beyond the scorn
of time’s great hand, unfractured in its grace
a fire made firm
a permanence no mortal hour could break.
“O oil,” he said, “you tempt the fleeting hand,
yet drown the edge where sacred form should stand;
you blur the law where line must understand
the inward order shaping every strand
you melt the god
inside the boundary of chosen shape.”
The merchants laughed with wine upon their breath,
and hung their saints where silence learned its split;
for even gold concedes itself to death,
and even kings forget the brush that lit
their borrowed throne
their faces cracking like a drying of clay.
Yet still he worked in rooms of powdered white,
where glue and whiting clothed the humble board;
and every stroke he made in stubborn light
was like a psalm too fierce to be ignored
a line that burned
against the velvet suffocation of decay.
He painted angels wrought of prismling flame,
whose wings were forged from vision’s inward fire;
and prophets speaking in unuttered name
whose eyes refused the comfort of desire
all form made fierce
all substance leaning toward the infinite.
But nothing held
the oil betrayed his will
the edges softened into breathless night
and what he built with longing art and skill
collapsed into a murmuring of blight
a fading hymn
that could not stand against the slow undoing of his time.
He cast the brush aside in wrath and thought
“What use is beauty if it learns to die
if every vision into ruin is wrought
and every god dissolves beneath the eye
what art remains
when form itself forgets its vow of fire?”
The masters smiled in academies bright
their canvases already faint with cracks
yet still they spoke of balance grace and light
while time crept softly up their painted backs
a hidden thief
erasing all they thought they had secured
left in red decay.
And so he turned to silence as his school
to unseen laws no patron ever buys
to forms that would not kneel to merchant rule
nor flatter the complacency of eyes
but lived instead
where vision keeps its covenant with flame.
And in some attic lost from polished taste
his small works burn against oblivion’s tread
while louder names are scattered into waste
like sugar upon the lips of what is dead
and only line
and only fire remembers how to stay in mortal thread.