When I contemplate your magic gifts tonight,
alone, the back-boiler creaking, the frosty moonlight,
I am reminded that you were Leonardo
reincarnate, the Cuchulain of canvas.
Paint never buckled under such pressure —
Guernica, vulgar goats, the portraits of Olga;
even something as brittle as 'Composition au Papillon'
has the finished look to make gods finite.

In Paris, at fifty-one, you could play God
with cloth, string, a thumb-tack, oil. Truth is
we are all born to an artless, provincial stench.
If we are lucky, Picasso, we die French.