He does not yet know he is “Rembrandt,”
the ‘d’ just recently dabbed into
his name, not yet a Dutch master, whose
only seascape, The Storm on the Sea
of Galilee, will be lost, heisted
three centuries later, torn down with
A Lady and Gentleman in Black,
the portrait he is finishing now,
both masterpieces silently rolled
into history. He’s a success
though still a young artist, not quite sure
of himself, and he’s been asked by some
lace-cuffed, silken-gloved couple to kill
his darling, blanket over in black
the boy he had spent hours perfecting,
the boy uninterested in posing,
the boy climbing all over the chair,
the boy chasing his dog and a ball,
the boy trilling like a little bird
before springing toward the painter
with exaggerated bulging eyes,
the boy who was easy to render
and difficult just the same, the boy
who did not wake up one day. Rembrant
nibbles the handle of his paintbrush
and sets to work: one solemn layer
atop the other until the child
is gone, as if the boy had never
been there at all, as if he were just
a phantom weeping behind a wall.
–
Robert Fillman is the author of House Bird (Terrapin, 2022) and November Weather Spell (Main Street Rag, 2019). Individual poems have appeared in The Hollins Critic, Ninth Letter, Poetry East, Salamander, Spoon River Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, and Verse Daily. He teaches at Kutztown University in eastern Pennsylvania.