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first
published in Connections 22, 2000;
in
collection, Waterhouse and the Tempest,
2009,
Acumen, ISBN 978-1-8731612-2-7.
Waterhouse and The Tempest
One of his last depicts
her on a coast
of
shattered stone. She grips her damp red hair
with
one smudged hand. No palms or glowing dunes
but
Cornish granite traps the cobalt air,
the
sea an oily swell, a fractured mast
stirs
doglike at her feet. Her durable
blue
dress, red-cuffed, resists this British gale.
Drenched
in an upper corner of his work
a
model ship is coaxed towards the rocks.
In
childish print another corner offers
his
name and year of painting: nineteen-sixteen.
Whiter
than fresh drawn sap she stares and suffers
with
those that she saw suffer: sailors lost
and
drowned almost before her father's word
subdues
the storm and lulls them gently home.
The
artist, sixty-seven and one year
from
death by cancer, holds no magic wand
to
quell the thunder. He reads this morning’s list
of
casualties and mouths each fading name,
his
aching bulk sunk in a garden chair,
his
style of art unfashionable, threadbare
and
even maudlin; while that girl, the same
in
all his pictures, treads towards the tide
and
hears no music on the tainted air.
Sean Elliott
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