To Love an Artist

Audrey Brumley

To love an artist is admiration
To watch as they pluck their nickel strings
Sitting on oak benches
In dusty corners of bookstores
Their hands gracefully worn and fragile
Grazing each vibrating note
As it flies by with such verity
To love the person sitting there
With layers of wrinkles and sunken smiles
To be the one who adores their lovers work
Being the old couples wrapped in their books
And unfeigned songs of one another
Their lives twiddled into thin yarn
Of crochet hats and quilts
Passed through lives of their children
And theirs,
Their sincerity moves through the generations
Of them to come
To love an artist is to love true
No poet can fake his words
No songwriter can write of wrong
Art is the act of truth
Through the hands of wise
With all the intention to adore
The life they make art from