The Portrait of the Artist

Poetry after a reading of The Picture of Dorian Gray

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

~after Oscar Wilde

The artist has lost
the abstract sense of beauty,
thinking it more autobiography
than poetry, an excuse
to expose scars like a scaffold,
and then request applause.

Beauty is simply beauty
as sea is simply sea,
no allegory residing
within the sun or the sky.
A body is born,
and a body must die.

The artist cannot escape
the terror of his words.
A life wasted
trying to describe
the invisible mystery
of an oyster shell moon,

and the exact symphony
chorded by the wind
blowing through the illuminated
quivering blades of grass.
There is no music except
this silence, like a panegyric

composed and sang
by the cicada
sleeping beneath the soil.
To claim to know the…