MONUMENT TO A KNOWN MASTER

Known to me as a full-blooded part
Indian of appetite and quiet approach
who with his two bare hands
and need for achievement more than success
made a silver mountain come
to a Mohammed also of his making;
known to have looked at the actual earth closer
and felt it more than, say, Frank Stella;

(I've been known to help him sculpt
a few hundred cedar trees for fence posts.
We did it well. We'll do it again.
What's eternity but now's awesomeness unendingly?
The life cycles come, the life cycles go,
and then they come again, a kind of heaven;
but it's not just the cycles that return
figuratively; it's everything; literally.)

known to be unaffectedly responsive,
he's influenced by all the things
he has ever done, whatever comes
to hand, like the goats and sheep
his wife Connie keeps for weaving,
or the mud of the road to the house
constructed with love and no telephone
way out past Taos Junction,

Sam Taylor's work is whole, will endure
and, because it's solid, will prevail.
He's made himself a master, although
the work's more master than the man.
And besides that, but somehow related,
is the socially astonishing fact that Sam
can eat more spaghetti at one sitting
than anybody else in the history of post-Renaissance art.

BACK