heaven

how he strolled across the canvas
of one mondayed afternoon
cloaked in cap and gown
and trailing cotton clouds of black
behind the air of his thick stride,
as if disrupting light itself,
head propped towards the ceiling-of-potential
with mocking downward glance
at all the pompe and grandiosity of academe,
how his thick Welsh accent strangled ours
within a fetish for uncertainty tossed about
until we scrambled past his exit
spilling inhalations out the breathless rush
as if to swallow-whole the doors
into the rare books room of his artistic inspirations
before daring to declare just one more stroke

how he stripped us bare of all our stabs at greatness,
just to penetrate the skin of something real,
triumphal arc of all submission
taking prisoners just to watch the bend
as we passed through

and how he'd stop to say;

"...you don't remember a world in which ladies
travelled around the countryside leaving calling cards -
calling on people and if not at home,
leaving visiting cards - little etched cards
deposited in ritualistic ways - sometimes two cards,
sometimes with one corner turned down..."

and then just walk away

how his intimate tone offered to enclose a captured crowd,
of how he balanced words
the way one stands a pencil on its end,
declaring from the lecturn of his darkened slide
"how elegant to the point of being precious,
how appallingly austere",
cut the gothic sensibility from within the fold
of "Whistler was a sarcastic little man"
which grew his gothic gasp at its tradition
of squeezing (Roman) idioms through self

how he once compressed Holbein's sinful portraits
into a comedy of lists, a cosmic overview that spread;
"...creation, temptation, expulsion while Adam
tils the soil with the bones of man to pope and emperor
as death steals the crown, the king, the cardinal,
empress-queen to bishop, duke to abbot abbess nobleman
as cannon to the judge and advocate of senator preacher
parish priest to monk-physician, astrologer for all
the miser/merchant seaman, knight and count-to-countess
lady dutchess pedlar plowman, one last judgement"

how he lined the windowed reflections on Durer's eyes
with curiosity so catholically contained
within its presentation, remarking once how Rembrandt
sliced his etching plates into quilts of something new,
Rembrandtian cut-up-machine becoming
of 15th Centuried excitement
for Guttenbergian print explosions
bound by Nurnberg Bible illustrations
well within a book aesthetic,
book-becoming that depends upon an opening,
on the space between two pages, on their lift and turn
and how he implored the dance of words across a print,
begged for alphabetic incorporations
across our press of plates
and
o
to be
neo medieval illuminati
wrought within (t)his time and place

most at home within the steady stream
of printer's ink dripping down a knife,
paper screams and costumed incongruities measured
by the welding-goggled-plaster-coated coverralls
filled within the whirl of contrapostoed process,
how many crashing christenings he had captured
in choreographies of flinging glass across the room
at steaming molds containing white-hot crucibles of bronze
as preface to the cracking-open of his molten pour,
precisely programmed just before
the chancellor-chambered crystal clinking clash
of standing by a fire, wearing tweed

how he once said;

"No doubt you are sceptical of heaven but I am not
because I know exactly what it is, it is a warm room
with a nice light and a soft chair and a man
who brings you a large box of prints."

and
even
now
how
a linseed oiled smell
seems synonymous with him