If Barthé’s Boy with a Flute
has completed his performance,
eyes rising to meet the eyes
of the one who listened
seated in a flowering grove,
then, perhaps, the viewer is invited to partake
of music and loose time.
If, however, the boy has not begun playing
in the flowering grove,
or has refused to begin, the song remains metaphysical
but turned inward, private,
thus the viewer must attend
to the bronze fact of his attenuated body,
where his heart would be.
“Truly it is a great thing to know of the rich heritage
of this French-speaking nation
and to learn we are all brothers under the skin after all,”
Barthé said to a reporter in 1949,
struggling with the Haitian president’s commission,
heavy with his mother’s death,
desolate and money-troubled.