To a Painter in England (for Harold Simmons)

Where you rot under the strict, grey industry
Of cities of fog and winter fevers, I
Send this to remind you of personal islands
For which Gauguins sicken, and to explain
How I have grown to learn your passionate
Talent with its wild love of landscape

It is April and already no doubt for you,
As the journals report, the prologues of spring
Appear behind the rails of city parks,
Or the late springtime must be publishing
Pink apologies along the wet, black branch
To men in overcoats, who will conceal
The lines of songs leaping behind their pipes.

And you may find it difficult to imagine
This April as a season where the tide burns
Black, leaves crack into ashes from the drought,
A dull red burning, like heart's desolation.
The roads are white with dust and the leaves
Of the trees have a nervous, spinsterish quiet.
And walking under the trees today I saw
The canoes that are marked with comic names;
Daylight, St Mary Magdalen, Gay Girl.

They made me think of your chief scenes for painting
Of days of instruction at the soft villa,
When we watched your serious experience, learning.
So you will understand how I feel lost
To see our gift wasting before the season,
you who defined with an imperious palette
The several postures of this virginal island,
You understand how I am lost to have
Your brush's zeal and not to be explicit.

But the grace we avoid, that gives us vision,
Discloses around corners an architecture whose
Sabbath logic we can take or refuse;
And leaves to the single soul its own decision
After landscapes, palms, cathedrals or the hermit-thrush,
That would inform the blind world of its flesh.