Artist Stranded on the Left Bank

Bruce Boston

Artist Stranded on the Left Bank

Having scaled the mountains of the moon
with no Sherpa for a guide,

having eaten steak and kidney pie
in the depths of despair
in a diminutive pub in Soho,

having consumed five-alarm chili
at The Brimstone Club
on All Saint’s Eve,

having wandered at random
through the endless galleries
of The Louvre on a wet afternoon,

having crawled the Continent
for love, for fury, for nothing
more than an impulse of the times,

he became a brash statistic
in the sordid history of absinthe,

deranged hallucination and
all his unspent masterpieces
revolving in his head.

_____________
Bruce Boston is the author of fifty books and chapbooks, including the novels The Guardener’s Tale and Stained Glass Rain. His writing has received the Bram Stoker Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Asimov’s Readers Award, and the Grand Master Award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. http://www.bruceboston.com/

Image Credit: “The Left Bank” by British artist Christopher R. W. Nevinson,1912 (The Dublin Museum). If you’ve read Nevinson’s story you’ll realize this suits Boston’s poem.