Painter Envy

I praise the gift, the sublime fever
 that urged early man, early woman
 to enliven ashen rock
 with self-portraits and hunting scenes.

I praise the gift of hands that seize
the embers of the everyday
and flare them into art.
Transfixing in its fixity,
a still-life is life still.

Just as the tale, by being told
is camphored against amnesia,
so the canvas remembers  forever
the mind’s cornucopia,
the world conjured and coloured
by the paint-crazed beholder.

Life revised, devised, by the hands
in spite of, because of, the eyes.