“Alzheimer’s Painting No. 1”
Self-Portrait by William Utermohlen
At eldr.com
A Poetic Tale in 3 Parts (Part 2 is quite longer than my usual work)
Part 1 – The Room
Some rooms are haphazard, encluttered, no plan,
Most rooms, laid out simply, let function prevail,
But certain rare rooms will embody a man
With his essence installed in its every detail
A hexagonal tower of fifty-foot height
Carries thirty-foot span above timber-laid floors,
Walls thick-built with stone quarried near to its site
On a twelve-acre ledge between gray granite tors
This room is but one of two towers that flank
A home in command of spectacular views,
The other is active, with full household rank,
But this one’s reserved for the master to use
So long has this room had to wait with a yearn
To provide the man’s ease, relieve decades of stress,
Now, finally retired, the man waits, in turn,
His eyes taking stock of his signal success
Part 2 – The Legacy
Hammered-iron-hinged doors of hand-hewn cypress plank,
Once opened to Sicily’s azure coast breeze,
Now lead unto greenswards that slope for the bank
Of a mountain stream mirroring New England trees
Mahogany moldings trim niches where stand
Busts of Madison, Hamilton, Adams and Jay,
Allegorical paintings by Renaissance hand
Depict Dante with Virgil in Hell’s grim array
Glazed library cases permit to be seen
Collected first imprints and rare objets d’ art,
The upper tiers accessed by railed mezzanine,
The middle, by stout rolling ladder with cart
Philosophers take up all eye-level posts,
With politics low placed near public affairs,
Arched, leaded stained-glass admits afternoon ghosts,
Bronze nailheads trim deep-tufted, glove-leather chairs
Impressive by standards of bibliophiles,
Near eight-thousand volumes repose in this room,
Discovered along countless thousands more miles
Of travel that brought a career full bloom
Beside books in English, the man’s mother tongue,
Are Latin, Italian, French, German and Greek,
Their fluency learned when he stood out among
Other Ivy League scholars, his talents unique
The poets, the classics, the myths, whether famed
Or obscure, each genre fills broad honored space,
Religion, the histories, authors inflamed
By the stirring events of their time in their place
Deeply piled Persian carpets yield lush vivid red,
Rich Belgian brocades of cerulean blue,
Iberian armor, dull-burnished like lead,
An ebony Steinway that Gershwin once knew
Hand-painted silk panels a modesty screen
With scenes from the Genji serenely expressed,
In contrast, bronze horses have Remington’s keen
Sense of elegant rampage that quickened the west
A brazier that coddled Arabian coals,
Once warmed desert princes when daylight was spent,
Its spun-brass dome punctured by crescent-shaped holes,
Reflects a vase, wheel-thrown in Stoke-upon-Trent
Colonial clockwork, long silent of chime,
Overlooks ivory chess pieces, mounted on jade
By a Mandarin craftsman who understood time,
The board of Brazilian woods marquetry-laid
A spyglass from a Hansa ship-of-the-line
And a Scots dirk recovered from Culloden Moor
Rest alongside the yellow-graved, high-lacquered shine
Of a Qing era battle-chest, male in allure
Rococo medallions of ormolu, graced
With circular sketches of Shelley and Blake
Rendered ably with subtle apt romantic taste,
From a proper Brit gallery near Windermere Lake
Heavy handfuls of Spanish-coined pieces-of-eight,
Raised up from the depths where Port Royale was felled,
Brim a Waterford crystal bowl traced to the date
Of the mass Irish exodus famine compelled
Johannesburg scales used for assay of gold
First discovered in outcrops at Witwatersrand,
Mohammedan manuscripts, centuries old,
From a Timbuktu cache burrowed deep in burnt sand
Old Ironsides replica sails an oak sill
Above artifact meerschaum, fine scrimshawed sea bones,
A splinter of marble from Parthenon hill,
Tucked in shallow vitrines, with odd fossilized stones
Italianate writing desk bristles with frames
Holding family and friends caught in candor and glee,
Two fountain pen heirlooms that signed countless names
Nest a belle époque box with Limoges fleur-de-lis
Kachina dolls, striking in ritual pose,
Evoke Hopi spirits from sunsets washed gold,
Snug fat matryoshki in linden-wood clothes
From Moscow’s famed Arbat where culture is sold
A small brazen cezve from Riyadh once brewed
Dark syrupy coffee the caliphs held dear,
A Maori atlatl made seemingly crude,
Yet deadly efficient for hurling a spear
Exotic svelte goddess, skin cocoa-brown toned,
Was sculpted by Erté at height of his powers,
A folio Medici patriarchs owned
Illuminates faith in a quilled Book of Hours
A copper-bowled Thai ceremonial gong
Rang Buddhist devotions from its saddle of teak,
A stone-age Lapp talisman, holed for a thong,
Forms an open-winged tern with a fish in its beak
Paired Portuguese pistols designed for the duel
With working steel flintlocks and burled walnut grips,
Ashanti scooped throne that’s a tusk-legged stool,
Algonquin reed breastplate with blue beaded tips
Mongolian quiver whose horn-pointed shafts
Were fired from horseback in times of the Khans,
Jacobean lapdesk whose lid closed on drafts
Of lectures prepared by ruff-necked Oxford dons
A rude limestone image that fits in the palm,
Depicting the ancient Basque goddess Mari,
It sits in a chewed-reed creel, plaited in Guam
For a Chamorro proa at work on the sea
Battlefield relics from a Gettysburg dell,
Two 6-pounder balls act as bookends for signed
First editions of Sandburg’s six volumes that tell,
In lyrical prose, Lincoln’s place in mankind
Enameled cast-iron, mechanical coin-bank
Sports woodsmen who chop at Bavarian spruce,
Etruscan cupped vessel with finger-length shank
From a curate in Naples whose ethics were loose
A Viennese music box pings Edelweiss
Near an Indian elephant sculpture whose back
Bears a howdah tricked out to dispense saffron spice,
And a Singapore tiger, moist eyes onyx black
A map-chest with copper escutcheons and keys,
Found serving a Maltese ship’s chandlery shed,
Holds nautical charts of the seven great seas
And historic ephemera, long gone unread
Two Civil War sabers respectfully crossed
Beneath a Sharps carbine, its fall-block intact,
A Romanoff inkwell with arms well embossed,
An Argentine bola whose wood orbs are cracked
Flemish tapestry dresses a French demilune
Where Ukrainian primitive icons surround
A chased silver chalice and Eucharist spoon
From medieval Córdoba whose smiths were renowned
An Inca made basket holds English clay pipes,
A calumet pipestone of Southern Paiutes,
And a Japanese kiseru favored by types
Who see themselves samurai in business suits
Pre-Columbian codex of roughly round shape,
And a petroglyph fragment of uncertain source,
Flank a Tuscany mantel with carved vines of grape
And a harvested wagonload drawn by a horse
A single-stemmed hookah, blue bowl long since wet,
Brought home from the oldest of Turkish bazaars,
Stands sober and innocent midst a white set
Of an old Kowloon herbalist’s porcelain jars
Magnificent Tiffany lamps glow like jewels,
Most won in live auctions, some bought on a lark,
A standing-globe made by the maker of tools
Thomas Jefferson used to track Lewis and Clark
An oak firkin cask bears, cut into its lid,
The Hudson Bay Company logo in script,
Its false bottom likely where contraband hid,
So long as the smuggler kept firmly tight-lipped
A broadside announcing the funeral train
Bearing Lincoln is fulsome with hand-wringing grief,
An art nouveau desk chair from Alsace-Lorraine,
Exuberant with alpine-flowered motif
A Bedouin kilim, Egyptian of weave,
Now hangs, mutely dyed, from a half-timbered wall,
An olivewood rosary found Christmas Eve
In a backstreet Jerusalem marketplace stall
Murano decanters, fair captured of light
Seen nowhere on earth, save in Venice by dawn,
Arranged on a gentleman’s charger some knight
Of long-ago Poland commissioned in fawn
A Crimean planter holds fiddlehead ferns
Overhanging a bridal chest fashioned in Crete,
Fresh garden cuts spray from Korean eared urns
Of the Joseon reign, fit with three ox-horn feet
Carnelian intaglios served celled Celtic monks
When sealing epistles with blood-tinted wax,
Fine joinery well marks compartments of trunks
That voyaged to Bombay with British Raj hacks
A croupier’s rake and two Monegasque dice,
Souvenirs of a night when he just couldn’t lose,
An orange-and-black shield with motto device
Emblazons his oar-blade that sculled Princeton crews
The world compressed into a singular room
Where life may be measured by energy spent
In acquiring cultural quanta that loom
As legacy lacking an heir to lament
Part 3 – The Man
A thumb-worn edition of Wordsworth sits riding
The subtle smooth motion of effortless breath
That only those souls most content and abiding
Are capable of, as they contemplate death
Rare vintage, pale brandy squats, warmed, in his palm,
Marsalis blows cool crystal riffs through the Bose,
Fleet fillips of flame dance duets with aplomb
Upon applewood logs whose scent nuzzles his nose
He wonders how long till the logs burn asunder,
The ash pit resembling an unadorned crypt,
How long till his tomb of mementoes falls under
Some auctioneer’s gavel, all sentiment stripped
Inevitably, every tower collapses,
Returning its stones to the grounds of their birth,
So, too, all men, body and mind, find relapses
To forms elemental of dust, air and earth
Why wait, with dementia now well on its run,
The getting? – it’s over, the having? – no joy,
He fingers the pocket that sags with his gun,
Trying hard to recall what he dreamt as a boy
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