Gary LeBel 

TITUS

You’ve caught him whole cloth as you watch him work, his love of art as transparent to you now as crystal,
 
            in the ease with which he mixes a color, evenly, workmanly, taking his time, enjoying the mood of each hue he makes with a grin as he blends one color into another and then glancing up at you with a loaded brush, lets his pride overflow as he sends you a sudden smile of recognition, that he sees you, loves you and whom you are becoming, you who’ll always be his son, his Titus van Rijn.
 
The streets outside your father’s studio have quieted now and you’re a little tired in the flickering lamplight– you yawn, trying hard to resist it, longing for your soft feather pillow, to draw your blankets up to your chin and drift away in sleep, to end the long day of intermittent sittings while your father paints you.
 
O how many sorrows will bite at the heels of these intimate hours you spend with him, to a time when his once-famed portraits will be thought of as out of style, his purse nearly empty, the company you’ll eventually set up to protect him from his creditors, and prevent them from whisking away his finished work from the easel still wet, the untimely deaths he’ll have to endure, grief that will pierce his heart and yours.

            “Though we’ve immortality now, Father,

I’d have gladly traded it away
            for a few more years,
an afternoon, an hour
together like this.”

“. . . you who’ll always be his son
. . .’ and ours.

Rembrandt van Rijn, Portrait of the Artist’s Son, c.1645-1650

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About the Author

Gary LeBel is an artist-poet living in the greater Atlanta area whose poems have appeared in journals throughout the USA, the UK, Japan, and India. He believes that art, or anything else worth doing, is a life-long pilgrimage.