The Painter’s Wife

Poetry by Omar Sabbagh
Photo by Vojna Andrea

He was a glad hand at shape and color,
his strokes across the canvas, like miracles

rejected by the world – its wide, sheer
sense of immanence: a code for what to yell, what to holler

at the artist who tries and tries again
to touch and bless the sky, his eyes burning into paint…

But he was, I thought, a very good painter –
talented, his talons; so that when the slur

came quick, came quickened, his wife’s –
that knowing the names of all the colors,

and that knowing the shape
of the humdrum shapes as well, was all

the tot and god in him, and all that draped
the deep and lifelong canvas of

his calling, the betterment and the battlement of his life –
it proved itself (the hip-wide slur, I mean)

a self-evident proof, automatic, stiff,
that it really didn’t matter if and when and if

his pictures proved like truths or true:
all that mattered, according to a discerning few,

was that when he flew and when he soared,
each stroke of paint (the very seam of his rewards)

was made to seem a silly thing – like words well-spelt
by a poet, say; only letters, of course; just words, just words.

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