Fame (after Boris Pasternak)

Self-portrait with a Tahitian woman (after Paul Gauguin) . 24"×30" (61.0×76.2cm). Oil on canvas. December 2011

After Boris Pasternak

Fame isn’t pretty. It’s indecent.

It drags you down with its weight,

like a neatly organized storage of sketchbooks and canvases.

I am here to give, to dissolve

-- not to be successful. Definitely not

for the infamy of hollow household name familiar in every mouth.

I am here to live, not to self-appoint.

To fall in love with space, to listen to the future.

To scrape away –

not only paint from canvases,

but days and chapters of my whole life.

To let obscurity conceal

my steps, and swim under its surface,

like a terrain concealed by fog,

when one can hardly see a thing.

There might be others, who will come

and trace my path, revealing

all layers of erasures, inch by inch.

Or maybe not -- I neither can nor

ever want to know whether the day be mine or no.

Just never to betray the truth (defying definition), and to be

alive, alive and nothing else, alive and nothing more.

The rest is silence.