Albert Kapikian - Arshille Gorky: Last Works, Starspray I and II

You have studied for this
ransomed thirty years with three

How to draw your last star
How to look at the world

One last time. It is what
you watched your mother see

Then, along with one and a
half million of your countrymen

the one and a half million stars
of 1915

still waiting
to punctuate your eye

Because the world was at stake
Then, or should have been

And you still want the sky.
You are burning into each star

And making it back
Ten, twenty times you go

But it is cold
Like the razors you paint with

So it is no wonder
You are finally tired

It is no wonder you finally ask
to stay with the stars

To paint yourself into them
And not come back


Arshile Gorky was born April 15, 1904 in Van, and died in 1948 in CT. 
This poem has appeared in Graham House Review, Spring 1990.