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David Chorlton
The Lost Teacher
Where the wind cut low across the treeless
hills with their edges of stone,
Mister Shaw took his paints
to mix with earth he scooped bare-handed
so he’d have more than the colour
on the canvas. His job
was teaching us to draw, but he showed
us his landscapes so we saw
that something more than lines
matters in art. There were the sodden
inclines, the cloud tinted curves
and tors jutting into what light
the sky could spare, and there was the haunted rain.
The draughtsmanship needed
to depict such a place
couldn’t be taught. After the uphill slog
to reach the right view, all was guesswork
as to where, beneath the stubborn grass,
to find the bones.
Visiting Du Fu
There isn’t much on Du Fu’s mind today
outside of dragonflies
which he watches from beside the river.
Once in a while he points out a tint
in the wings, and then goes back into himself.
He’s too quiet to be good company
and I keep asking questions he won’t answer:
Does every raindrop contain a grasshopper?
Is there a mountain inside every cloud?
He looks at me and smiles
as if I ought to know the answer.
He’s so contented, it irritates me
and I wish I hadn’t come here
to see him float on time
as it flows into another day. Du Fu says
even the orioles, as they come and go,
yellow and black, singing to the light,
know that the time is always now.
I tell him I’m from an age far off in the future
when knowledge exists in fragments
that arrive without instructions
on how to put them together, and not a moment goes by
without somebody trying to attract our attention
and sell this or that. He returns to his gazing
while I can’t name a single dragonfly.
What kind is that one? I ask,
and he replies,
Don’t interrupt me when I’m doing nothing.
©2013 by David Chorlton
David Chorlton was born in Austria, grew up in England, and spent several years in Vienna
before moving to Phoenix in 1978. He pursued his visual art and had several shows as well as writing
and publishing his poetry in magazines and collections, the latest of which is The Devil’s Sonata
from FutureCycle Press. Although he became ever more interested in the desert and its wildlife, the shadow
side of Vienna emerges in his fiction and The Taste of Fog, which was published by Rain Mountain Press.
His chapbook, Melancholy's Architecture, has
been published online by Slow Trains.
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