The Artist

"Is this an Avalokiteshvara figure?"
the professor asks the painter beside his work.

"Mmm. . . yes, it is," his reply
awkward, akimbo,
smiled.
"I see."

The same question had been posed in Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa,
before temple murals and
dissolving limestone carvings where no artist could answer,
his village fame having faded
hundreds of years ago. And no signature.
The answers are left
to the students of culture trained in types and brilliant arguments,
constructing the obvious conjectures.

The artist's apartment
is no more than a cube in a cement matrix
wrapped around a courtyard:
a well shaft lined with balconies,
no water to be drawn.

The question, the answer:
between the two the artist's brush
creates a bodhisattva-Avalokiteshvara-infinite compassion-
the canvas stroked butane blue,
lightly as a brush of flame or the caesura in breath
as the image ravishes the viewer,
strikes through the eyes, plunges into stomach and lungs:
we are changed before we speak,
stripped of our critical language,
no tools for dissection, no anesthesia,
no charts, no theories,
no names.