This poem is dedicated in loving memory of, and deep gratitude for George Parker, the artist who helped my father discover his gift for painting while floating the dark sea of Alzheimer’s. Some day, I hope to thank Mr. Parker properly for what he did for Dad, and so many others (he died a few weeks after Dad). RIP, Mr. George.
(The painting is of the Sand Island Lighthouse near Mobile Bay, by George Parker)
The Painter
Through marsh and bog, on piers
half-bridging some lost bayou near the bay
with canvas, oil and brush
the briny painter made his brackish way
toward a lighthouse, lone
and long against the channel waters, where
torpedoes once tore bands
of brothers from the scrolls of yesteryear.
Perhaps he came because
a hull within the harbor of his heart
unhinged and set adrift
across the darkened waters, where all art
must find its wings and wait
’til bayward breeze upon the spray is stirred,
thus lifted by the lights
from towers where the call, “Come home,” is heard.
As reverent as a priest
at Eucharist, the painter, with his face
awash in awe, set lines
and colors to his icon of that place,
symbolic of a time
when he’d first heard the story of the light,
and of its keeper’s name,
and many who’d been rescued in the night.
As time did burnish bricks
and rend a schism to the mortar’s hold
yet left the burning beam
alight atop the weathered head, so old,
time’s hands a double dose
of deepest pain poured in the chalice of
a lonely painter’s heart,
stopped cold and final for the lack of love.
Pulseless and dead to earth
the painter lay mere moments from the brink
of no return to clay,
light years away from what a mind can think
or say or see or know.
Yet in those blessed hours so far removed
from any fear or want,
a Visitation which may not be proved
took all the pain away
and shocked the stillness in the painter’s soul
with thunder, and the dance
that quickens lifeless flesh to make it whole.
Unconscious, in the seen
and seeming truth on which existence tells
its narrative of toil
and fear and death, its heavens and its hells,
above his darkest depths
the painter rose aright like moon-drawn tide
toward a Voice he knew,
which spoke from deep within the Light to guide.
A primal longing grew
within his soul to hide himself and spend
forever in this place
he felt to be Love’s truthful start and end.
Just then, commotion broke
around the bedside where his body lay;
the Lighthouse of his dream
appeared as though more distant, as the day
distilled from God to now.
Departing gently from the other shore…
he heard a final echo
from the Light, reverberating then
and evermore to give
new meaning through a death that might have been.
“Painter, you will paint,
indeed, much as you have along these years.
But now, instead of light,
your subjects will be shadows, drops of tears,
muted no-name vessels
left unmoored upon the moonless wave,
fog-bound faces homeward
peering for a beacon that could save.
You my child, are now
the keeper of the lighthouse you have sought —
You survived, and so
will rescue with the lifeline that you caught.
Many lives will see the
glory of a painter’s gift reframed
and will tell the timeless
story of lost memories reclaimed.
Now the painters are the
promised keepers of the towered light
that illuminates
all places of unknowing in the night.
For an artist is an
artist, though beset by age or ill.
Love must share the gift
imparted through the Painter’s living will.
