Death of the Art Teacher: poem by Daniel Fitzpatrick

image by Heather Williams, on Pixabay

The Death of the Art Teacher

You loved to show me how to see the world,

how the endlessly divisible things

we spell by rainbow, insect, shark, all curl

inside the silver curves the graphite sings 

against the paper’s possibility,

how light elides its own soft vanishing.

You bore my blinding inability

and drew me back toward the sun that rings 

the triumph of what splinters, crumbles, fades.

I hear your heart, your heart’s ease echoing

along the galleries, among the glades,

through silences that time can never bring.

You are again the light below the door

Imaging what is in what is no more.

_____________________

Daniel Fitzpatrick is the author of two novels, a poetry collection, and a translation

of Dante’s Divine Comedy. His book, Restoring the Lord’s Day, is out now from

Sophia Institute Press. He is the editor of Joie de Vivre: A Journal of Art, Culture, and

Letters for South Louisiana, a member of the Creative Assembly at the New Orleans

Museum of Art, and a teacher at Jesuit High School in New Orleans, where he lives

with his wife and four children.

July 2024 issue