You can still recall those ancient critiques 
In the arguments you’ve taken with yourself, 

Oddly important within each moment. 
A painting is a still life, lived now. 

Only one painting has really progressed 
Through seventy years, yet incomplete. 

And no one could ever hold your hand, 
Betrayal implied in the faintest if only, 

Brought forward, where you still breathe 
Dreaming in the same trembling images—

Then, when you think of them now 
With a kind of bemused guilt, 

What makes such reverie possible is all 
That you’ve learned to dare in tenderness, 

And that drawing is the only way 
To explore contemplation thoroughly, 

Though that vision often buckles 
Finding such excursions never easy. 

Pushing expensive pigments across 
Tenuous ideas with a weighted brush—

All these portfolio marginalia are still unpacked, 
Yet, take this as it’s meant, with thanks. 

Poet’s Note: “Emblems of Conduct” is an imagined letter to my senior painting professor, Richard Merkin, at the Rhode Island School of Design, 1969.

Bio: Edward Baranosky

* Publisher’s Note:

Richard Merkin (1939–2009) was an American artist and educator, whose illustrations appeared often in The New Yorker and whose column “Merkin on Style” appeared in GQ (1988–1991).

The quotation in the epigraph above appeared in the fashion trade journal The Daily News Record in 1986, as per William Grimes in The New York Times (13 September 2009); link confirmed on 7 August 2025:
Richard Merkin, Painter, Illustrator and Fashion Plate, Dies at 70

The quotation was reprinted a few years later in Merkin’s commentary in Tijuana Bibles: Art and Wit in America’s Forbidden Funnies, 1930s-1950s (Simon and Schuster, 1997).