Albert Bierstadt considers his critics

 

I’ll break my easel into fire-scrap,

knot my brushes into a duster,

then scour the day in Washington Square

listening for gossip rich enough

to gild a plot. From a farmer’s limp,

a deacon’s leer and jurist’s frock coat,

I will meld my hero and pen him

into a sea of inky troubles.

Who would decry his federation?

 

​

But if I know yarrow by the Platte,

deer browsing an aspened park at dawn,

nameless peaks jagged as a pike’s mouth

and paint them under the massing sky

of a glorious storm they call me 

an assembler, a confectioner

false to truth and nature, thus to art.

 

In New Bedford the sailors all know

Ahab’s tale is no biography.

Is he a lie? Forged from injury,

rumor and imagined fire, he rides

his blindness toward every soul’s abyss.

Where’s truth then, in rigor or in rave?

Ensemble is not pastiche, by God.