R.B. KITAJ'S PORTRAITS

You smile as a Jew in a fedora
but without the Torah in exile
staring at your portraits
of poets Creeley and Duncan
as you paint a fascist cell
in Warsaw
or a Russian woman
in the Gulag
you make our century real
in the flames of our history
someday an angel in Revelation
will accept an invitation
extended from the Isle of Patmos
to open the Lamb's book
of life in seals of the great I AM,
he will reveal that the Word
is hid in our heart
only to be exposed as poetry
as in Blake's divine art.