Despair of the Painted Sky

I

My youth. My youth. My long forsaken youth,
When fantasies made up my summer days
And life had naught a word to say to truth.
My youth! When e’er my sun broke through its rays
The clouds became a carousel of things.
Forever swirling round and round the sky
I saw a great giraffe with pluming wings,
And too a snail that somehow learned to fly.
These concrete clouds beneath a perfect blue,
Were no abstracted play things of a boy,
But hardened facts as any man could view;
As real as stones or as my favorite toy.
In happiness I spent the wage of life,
And youthful wonders never seemed to fade.
Until my Brutus brought his gilded knife,
And youth was by the demon Time betrayed.

II

Our parting paid in wretched pains untold,
As moments passed beneath that silver throne.
What liar said, ‘There’s good in growing old’?
Did he not know that clouds are clouds alone?
The grayness, dull and dreadful, hurts the most,
For any soul would have that dire thirst-
A need to see a monster or a ghost.
A life without those visions is the worst
Of any fate to fall upon a man.
My melancholy spirit runs the show-
A madness since majority began.
This base recurrence drives my anguish low
Beyond the depths of sunshine and the sea,
Beyond the powers pushing me to dive
And break the clouds in waves of wat’ry glee.
Alas I live, unwilling to survive.

III

As fledgling days are passed and laid to rest
A new affliction bears its foaming teeth.
I bow my head in fearful trembling, lest
The wraiths above are worse than those beneath.
And when at last, surrendering, I look,
I see not clouds but paintings in the air,
As if I gazed upon a picture book,
With mighty Nimbus locked before my stare.
The thunder claps inside my brimming head
Are no more real than Cirrus nigh the stars.
And as the twilight burns the evening red
I see a canvass ceiling flushed with scars.
O sweet repose! O victory of night,
When, through my bedroom window, eyes relax
Upon a scene of dancing faerie light.
For myth, in all its wonder, has the facts.

IV

The black deceit has worn my soul away
Into an inky powder of the Earth.
I do not hear the consolations gay,
But only pray that death will hail new birth.
How can a simple human soul press on
When everything is just a great façade;
Concealing nothing more than figures drawn
By that wayfaring, mad, mechanic, god.
The lion is a statue made of rock,
And mountains are but sketchings of his pen.
A rainbow is a smear upon his smock,
And he composed the songs of finch and wren.
I may not trust myself nor think again,
Without the dreadful knowledge that my soul
Belongs to him, who paints the evening rain,
And reads my will upon his gilded scroll.

Art:
Seaside Sunset, Franz von Stuck
Clytie, Fredrick Lord Leighton
Pack Clouds Away and Welcome Day, Edward Robert Hughes