Portrait Of The Artist As A Family Man

He painted from a need
That cut him off from siblings
And ill-mated parents.
Who would have thought a merchant-seaman,
Caught in mid-Atlantic trough
Instead of Flanders trench,
Should ache to hold a paintbrush
In his hand, like genteel dilettante,
And conjure from those fag-stained fingertips
A vision of the world as delicate and fugitive
As that of any Japanese court artist?

My not-quite-housetamed father,
Offending his more educated wife
With adjectives a little bit awry
(As in mountaineous mountains,
Ah, the hurt even now to mention it)
And not quite trusted
When her perjink friends,
Slung out from Singapore,
Would visit for high tea.

These dim torn photos show a man
Accoutred for his time and class
The bunnet on his head un-youthing him,
Legs baggy in plus-fours,
And still that cigarette in hand, a cocky
Smouldering gesture of masculinity unfazed.

He took to southern Ayrshire's hills
As his ancestral right,
Armed with cane fishing-rod and
Fern-lined wicker box to coffin
Troutlet from the pebbly upland burns,
His box of watercolours in spare pocket,
As necessary to the inner man as any food.
And still the strange creative impulse pushed him,
To summon windblown landscapes of the mind.

That restless mind had other interests too.
Encyclopaedias, books, and magazines
On science and technology lay
scattered through the family home.
He sang, as one who understood,
John Ireland's stirring setting of
John Masefield's wanderer's text,
"I must down to the seas again."

He died when I was eight,
Leaving as testament the
Wordless eloquence of his art;
A mathematical prodigy of a son.

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