Pontormo's Entombment & Annunciation, 1528
Capponi Chapel, Santa Felicità, Florence
The caretaker won’t make change
for the machine that lights the paintings,
but the blues, pinks, and golds are
nearly bright enough to see in the dark:
worker angels, women, the mother
swooning toward the only body to obey
gravitational law. Thirty-three years
before, no one did—on the adjacent wall,
Gabriel and Mary levitate with news.
When someone drops a coin
into the metal box, the sudden light
sets everything in motion: tempera
spools of green and peach unwind
the story left to right, right to left,
and there, recessed, the red-haired painter,
plainly clothed, looks upon the scene like us.
The caretaker steps outside to smoke.
I move more freely then around
the iron gate that keeps the tiny chapel
locked, strain my neck to view
the ceiling’s dome, careful of the stones
I balance on. I visit not because I believe
but because I need to understand
something about time. The mother
twice receives her child: from nothing,
nothingness: a bearing of the unbearable
all the way borne, past the unbecoming,
air dark with an imperceptible now.
Blue Collar Devotions
*
Our teacher said that poets write
the poems of home away from home,
then read Shelley’s “Mutability”
and Wordsworth’s “Mutability”
and something of his own to us
to prove the point, which on no level
could I understand, confusing mutable
with silent—he made me look it up—
disbelieving home would ever change.
*
Cortege of clouds here,
terracotta rooftile,
its moss, its weedy flowers,
pigeons gurgling, purring,
a flash of mirror at their throats.
Then slanting rain that stops the buskers.
Then sun that starts them up again.
Sheets of aluminum,
sheets of gold,
what was begun erased,
erased resumed,
in a circle the sky keeps track of.
*
Having learned efficiency cleaning houses,
Nana’s untied her rain cap, knocked
the drops off, and scrubbed my face with spit
the smell of lipstick all in one go,
as my mother, her only child, pulls
mascara blackly through pale lashes,
opening her starburst eyes to read
books with her father, two dreamy readers
who carry umbrellas, wishing for rain,
while my father with wet hands unloads
his service weapon at the door, rounds
hidden one place, pistol another, coins he
means for me to pilfer dropped in plain sight.
*
When raccoons came for our beer, the boys threw
our empties at them. When we said we were
leaving and they flicked their cigarette butts instead,
the raccoons just picked them up and held them
like Frank Sinatra. I read in the library later
raccoons make great predators because they are
a lot like us. Between reading Edith Hamilton’s
Mythology and Khalil Gibran, I thought about
my period first and crush second. When the boys
played The Doors my best friend and I went
to her room to practice kissing and lip-synch
The Jackson 5. Alone I played Carole King and
dreamed of flying with my own arms out
the window over the trees. I was interested
in achieving figure eights around the city’s
landmarks horizontally and around the cloud
formations vertically, and though I’d never been,
Connecticut sounded like a good place to go.
*
In a niche of the palazzo, one recessed arch, really, five storeys tall,
someone has made his home: like mine, unseen from the square;
unlike mine, cardboard floor, sleeping bags, a bentwood café chair,
its back to me. Since 1919 the palace has housed an art collection,
and in this city of paintings, it almost looks as if he’s painted himself
in, safe from rain, the scale of stone offset by bare skin, pigeons,
water bottles, a growing circle of Renaissance geometries.
I’m a stranger here, but not the only one. The gardens and museum
teem with tourists; in 1944, during the bombings, local evacuees
camped out in both, the art having been moved already to
safety. We protect what we value. Leonardo drafted the ideal
proportions of the human body: navel at the center of a circle,
genitals at the center of a square. Vitruvian Man is rarely
displayed as any extended exposure to light will destroy it.
*
Every painter paints himself, said Leonardo,
and so many others the maxim cannot be
definitively attributed. Writers also
write themselves, using I, to quote Stendhal,
as the quickest way to tell the story.
He was first to record a condition later
named for him, Stendhal Syndrome,
a literal art attack, in which a viewer is struck
by beauty so sublime they faint or suffer
other symptoms Italian physicians still treat
today—Botticelli’s Venus is often cited
as a cause. The APA insists the phenomenon
is neither a syndrome nor a diagnosis
but more a sort of mass hypnosis inspired
by tourist anticipation and the breathless,
destabilizing looking up that lauded art requires.
My mother loved the art of the Renaissance
but only ever saw in person Michelangelo’s
Pietà at the New York World’s Fair in ‘64.
For a time nearby, we had a little garden
she tended, and as a child I followed
behind as she tipped the watering can or
pulled a weed, picking, she so often said,
her best blooms. My strong hands, greedy
eyes: even now I believe my avarice rivaled
only by the Medici and Rockefellers.
How else to explain my devotion to looking
intently up in the museums and down
in the gardens, why I must visit every
flower and will not pick a single one.
*
I rode in the saddle
with him, and when we neared
the wooden arm, he’d lift me high above
his head and hold me over the edge saying, Reach,
Reach. It didn’t matter if I got it. I don’t remember if I ever
did. Let’s go again, I’d say. Or maybe he said that.
And so, we did, again and again. The brass
ring was not the metaphor.
The circle was.
*
A school group is discussing anatomical correctness
while I pretend not to eavesdrop
and consider how the sculpture, if I touched it,
would feel as cold and hard
as they’d felt.
The first time
the funeral director said not to bring the shoes
and the clothes could be altered to fit, I didn’t
understand. Like when I learned the stars I counted
might not be there.
The concept, figural woman,
face of a Madonna, body strong and polished
as a power lifter’s. And so tired—had she eaten
the poppies underfoot?—perfect
in repose, time and her place in it
nothing to her now, nowhere
to shine but here.
*
Six of us on the old bedspread in the grass looking up,
Pop scraping out “Twinkle Twinkle” on his fiddle.
We kids had named the dog that. She’s here, too,
silken ears, white scruff whiter in the moonlight.
I’d learned the word bucolic and kept trying to use it
in a sentence. Pigeons that shuffled through the grass
had gone home. Why hadn’t we? The sculpture was
Night, reclining like us. School yard of stars, in clusters
or alone. Some whose voices carried, others streaking
fast across the asphalt. Those are meteors, said someone,
probably not me, always a lag between what I thought
and what was. Star logic, light that reaches us after.
*
A text from no one
in my contacts reads
Where are you now?
The area code my own from childhood,
causing me to want to reply
with exact coordinates, a weather update,
and details of the view from here:
clouds, cypress, star jasmine, the shadows
of shirts that wave their arms from clotheslines,
small pot of rosemary on the sill trailing
in fullest sun its branches.
Have you found me yet?
Used millennia ago
to embalm the dead. Rosemary,
Ophelia said, for remembrance.
In Dante’s Paradiso,
Beatrice explains why angels have no need
for memory, being of undivided mind,
and though I struggle with the poet’s
hierarchies of spherical orders,
I understand, no angel myself, this:
I saw the child my father was,
at the end. Original skull,
eyes filled with elsewhere
even as he read his prayerbook, mouthing
words, dribbling some. A circle,
closing—and my mother, her mother, her father,
their grandchildren once
light as air. Here are the poems, Keats wrote.
Committed to memory, we say.
If not there, where
are we to find them.
