Egg-and-Dart

The master’s own apprenticeship concluded,
Perhaps too early, with a masterpiece:
A seraph in a doorway gazing on
A child Madonna shrouded like a crone,
Her misery suspended by the word
The angel brings of joy soon to be born,
And soon thereafter fixed upon a cross.
The scene was carved from one seamless pink slab,
The maker hardly older than the maid.
It is a wonder. Go sometime and see.

Four decades since have not produced the like.
Such is my master’s failure, justly grand,
As mine is justly slight enough to keep
Within the margins where I’ve made a life
Of egg-and-dart-and-egg-and-dart-and-egg.
Sometimes a serif or a curlicue
Alters the line, a blossom now and then,
Brief variations on a constant theme.
I make the new boys practice till they weep.
For them I’m yet no different than the master,
Another beard, another marble hand.
The older ones know better. Egg-and-dart
They loathe, and gladly shirk, and cannot think
Of anything but being soon beyond it.
They make good sport of me: the Knave of Darts,
Methuselah, the Master’s Wife, his Mother.
Each cohort think their cleverness the first.

Some have, it’s true, succeeded, in a way.
A few have set up workshops of their own,
Contending for commissions now with us—
Dull, churchy tableaux mostly, gaudy stuff
Fit only for the pious and the rich.
Not one of them has yet achieved a piece
Like that with which our master made his name,
And none could ever chisel egg-and-dart
More than a pace or two, and those two false,
The darts strung loose, no pair of eggs the same.
Though some lacked cunning, most lacked only care,
And even when I made them watch my hands
Shaping a path across the element,
None of them saw the Knave of Darts himself.
If any had, he might have seen a man
At home within the shadow of a man,
Content to turn out faultlessly his craft
For children’s pay and incidental thanks.
No wonder they looked elsewhere for their dreams.

My own, of late, touch on the blessed Virgin,
Mantled in pink, just as our master made her,
The day he drew the rubble from her face
And found her flushed with motherly despair,
Compelled to carry what she might not keep.
I pray that she will guide the master’s hand
One final time, for one last worthy form,
A miracle to warm his dying fame,
A garment of which I might take the hem.

This morning, though, no mysteries are revealed.
Fleeing an endless luncheon with the count
To play a prince among apprentices,
Our master has declared, perhaps in jest,
That egg and dart are meant to signify
The figures of a woman and a man
Begetting undistinguished generations
One undistinguished coupling at a time.
An older boy, restless to show his wit,
Suggests that egg and dart are eye and tongue,
Perceptive and appetitive in turn,
Enshackled by their mutual disdain.
Such games and riddles I have heard before.

Now we will lose the working day to talk
Of women’s tongues and men’s relentless eyes.
Wine will be brought, a boy will play guitar.
No one will think to ask me what I think.
For forty years I’ve cut the egg, the dart.
I’ve never known a woman or a man
As I have them. Not my own eyes and tongue.
I know what they are, I know what they’re not.
If you should ask, I’d answer, they are stone.