the sculptures of the women looking down
and one of two great lions, claws unsheathed
—vigilant, though their stone eyes look on nothing.
And last and least, it’s me hunched on a pew,
scribbling to the light of burning candles,
trying to hide the sacrilege of writing
from all the other watchful bodies here,
those hardened into statue and those moving
steadily, until they trickle out
from the confines of the church. Sublime
extravagance, we find it, as we exit
into the portico and out the doors,
putting some space between it and ourselves
until the dome reappears, its arcs aglow,
the dusk-lit clouds around it pinkish white
and drifting past in gilded lumps like stucco
or bodies of other angels, selves, contorted,
rapturous, and—finally—dissolved.
At the Church of Santa Prassede
In the Chapel of the Garden of Paradise (Rome)
Heaven would be dull compared to these
panes and flecks of color
curving over us—.
Every surface covered.
Every surface jewelled.
Coral and jade. Turquoise, topaz, agate.
More succinct than paint,
these glassed, transcending hues.
From the smallest scale they widen
into landscapes more intense
than we imagined, obliterating
even the idea of sin, and creating
a realm that we can look to from our realm.
Who cares if there is no window, no sun,
no home like this dreamed mosaic
except in memory?
Who cares about the doorway
(which must be entered) to a dimmer world
or that there is nothing
of our language rendered clearly,
when there is this vision made entirely
of particles assembled,
which didn’t arrive?
See how the eye moves
from cut, shimmering square
to cut, shimmering square,
each increment’s aspect placed
(like the flecks of an insect’s scale)
by hands that have disappeared?
How it matters that those hands have disappeared?
At the Church of Santa Maria Novella
(Florence)
There is nothing to hold me.
The marble floor is bare and hard.
The buttressed ceiling seems to swim
with coldest gusts—.
From one end of the church, a burst
of piped-in choral music—Handel,
or is it Mozart? In tinny jubilation,
the voices of exuberance
pour from the candlelit apse.
A group of tourists pauses
before this church’s masterpiece,
Masaccio’s Trinity, their guide explaining
the precise new view arranged
by the deceptively painted panels
the artist contrived: there,
Masaccio created a room or temple
for Christ’s crucifixion, “an example
of the Renaissance’s first linear
perspective.” And here,
the false recesses of Masaccio’s chamber
contrast with the marble floors
and columns of the church that appears
so impermeable our flesh might slip
away from it, might fall and shatter.
Masaccio’s fresco holds Christ
against the slick, flat surfaces like bones
that do not hold a thing:
a corridor inside a temple
inside a room of time,
a place where he can hang
in our glance, an invented embrace.
God stands behind Christ,
a white dove on his chest.
God’s cloak is a cloud of dark blue.
He appears to support Christ
in his suffering
but that blue cloak billows
as if it were made of emptiness,
of cold and multiplying space.
Christ’s cross will tip back
and his body, barely fastened to it,
will tear through that thin, fading layer
of the artist’s color, tumble back
beyond surface, through a distance
without memory, without stars,
without God’s voice. And he
will have to suffer that falling.
At the Church of San Crisogono
(Rome)
I’m hanging around the outskirts of the altar.
Entra! the custodian tells me, sweeping his hands,
and hesitant to step up there, I do:
What strikes me first is the long aisle
that spreads from where I stand through the expanse
of the church’s hollow. Like a theater’s
stage the apse gives me a different view
from what I thought I’d seen, a backward view:
I see where people seat themselves to listen.
I see the path that leads them to the pews
but don’t see what’s on either side, and don’t
catch any of that whorled maze of mosaics
that crown and background me (or who would speak
from here). The baldachino’s columns
gleam with faint slant lines of light.
I’ve glimpsed a lot of gold-encrusted rooms
with radiant digressions on each side
and lavish, painted chapels, but I think
the best place for god-worship is like this:
a narrow rectangle, a room plain and severe
so no one loses focus, with authority
above, and awe boxed in below.
In a pew by an effigy, a beggar woman
with a cloth around her head sits, bends, and bobs
as she mutters to her Christ. Outside
the thunder cracks and splinters like a gun
(we came inside from violent morning rains).
Still up on high, I linger to one side
of the lectern, so my vision is askew,
but I don’t want to bother honest worship
and I’m aware of my shoes that, trailing rain
and runoff from Rome’s flooded cobblestones,
muck up the clear, delineated marble:
gray-green, white, and blue triangles and squares;
octagons, circles in circles, perfect forms
tucked and bound, eternally, it seems.
Out in the pews, another person prays.
He catches sight of me, but doesn’t frown
or shake his head. How does he bear
us awkward, gawking tourists, who don’t come
to worship, in his space? I step back down
and look behind the lectern as I do:
the dark wood-carved reliefs around the apse
show angel after angel with splayed wings.
For a century they’ve kept their length of silence.
The man who waved me in is locking doors
with clicking sounds. The woman leaves her pew
and kneels before the sculpture of the Virgin.
With high, insistent tones her phrases rise,
lilt and rise before red candles burning.
We enter rain to fragments of her pleading.
At the Church of San Pietro a Maella
(Naples)
In the distance, someone plays a piano
as I walk into the interior stripped
as bones, and see a woman weeping
in the first side chapel. She shields her face
with a hand to hide her eyes, her body
turned to one side on the pew, as if
only half of her were worshipping,
as if she might bolt at any moment.
The nave is simple, with keyhole windows
that admit ample light. An old crucifix
(Byzantine? medieval?) hangs on a wall
that crumbles, its scarlets and ochres soaked
into dark aged wood, their outlines softening.
Deep in the church, I discover something:
an abandoned chapel, a sort of homage
to neglect, dust-covered and shabby, with cobwebs
blocking the window, the once-vivid paint
of frescoes of saints turned gray on gray,
the fabulations of image worn down
without rescue. I touch the scenes, which are cold
and like palimpsests. The chapel’s sculptures
are powdering, their edges adrift,
their wings and faces grotesquely broken.
The most truth I’ve seen, this rotting vision.
Also the most sad. No one has swept
out decay, held it back or at bay. When I’m done
with looking, I stand at the church’s entrance
and absorb the impression. What’s magnified
seems small, unsacred. And what is fading
is vastness—vastness built inside.
Then the clamor and hammering of Naples returns,
and the dingy sunlight, and market stalls
and brusque, rough gestures, and shadows that race
each minute, each step. In the church behind me
the old walls weep interminably
their vestiges of…history? faith? some
deeper crafting? It isn’t a place
I’d seek for an ideal holiness
but it holds them well, I think: my world
and another world that disappears,
shedding its textures and its tints,
more fascinating and more clearly
what it never was than I imagined.
At the Church of San Clemente
(Rome)
Once more I’ve come to see what can be seen:
flashes of gold, a raised medieval choir
of ivory, tile in snaking patterns
that ravel and unravel on the floor.
It’s winter. There’s a damp, raw,
penetrating chill to all the marble
although the nave is lanced with whitish sun.
I see my breath beside the ancient columns.
Today, there are no real worshippers. All
are here for mere art’s sake. Just well-
dressed tourists, scented, prosperous,
who wander, awed, or rest along the pews
so I walk down steps into the old basilica
whose chambers lie below street level
above an even older site of worship.
Instead of vibrant, gold-entwined mosaics,
here the frescoes graphing out the tales
of saints are losing hues before my eyes,
their actions seen in parts. The floor’s
red surface has been almost walked away.
Down at the lowest level, after
visits to several mildewed, dusty rooms
(a bare bulb every ten feet lights the way),
I see something that strikes me as even stranger:
four doorways, one after another, each
the size of a person, keyhole-shaped rectangles
rounded at the top. I guess
it’s not so strange, except they’re cut in stone
precisely for a body to pass through
as many have for centuries by now.
I pass through every one of them,
my shadow gliding along uneven floors
in front of me, lumpish and black. Last
of all, as I’m set to ascend, I see
one cavern barred behind a grill
of iron at the bottom of the stairs, and stoop
to look inside: The light from where I stand
extends a little into that weird place
but then is sucked inside it, dwindling
in increments, until all I can tell
of the back, the very back of it, is blackness.
It’s noon and the church must close. I climb
up into the brighter rooms as bells
begin: six rings, six more. And I emerge.
At the Church of Santa Cecilia
(Rome)
It is all about restoration
in the courtyard of the basilica
where a man in a white uniform scrapes
at the antique marble basin
in the middle of an empty fountain.
He wears a clear mask and a white hood.
His tool makes a high, keening sound
as it flays bits of dust from the past.
The fountain is surrounded by orange mesh
draped from red poles.
Inside, Cecilia will be all white,
coiled cold marble, her faced turned
from us all. I walk into the entryway
where cupids with distorted faces
and wreaths of fruit for halos soar on walls,
small painted puffs of cloth
covering their tiny penises.
Straight ahead, a mosaic of Jesus,
Mary, St. Peter, Cecilia, her husband Valerian,
and the jutting, crooked towers of holy cities
beside rows of faithful flocks, in Byzantine form
reflects some bits of celestial glory
through windows leaking meagre light.
Christ blesses them all with one raised hand.
The marble Cecilia lies as she was “found”
when they opened her tomb in 1599:
curled on one side, knees bent, wrists together.
Instead of her face, I see the shape of a small breast
under folds of thin cloth, the back of her neck
and the terrible executioner’s gash
across her throat (a botched beheading
that did not, reportedly, kill her for three days).
The cloth wrapping her head
has slipped to show a few stray locks of hair.
She looks as if she has chosen to twist her sight,
has pressed her seeing hard into the ground.
As I walk back through the courtyard, I see
the restorer’s face. She has unzipped
the top of her white suit a little (because
of the heat? For a little more freedom
of movement?). Her blouse under the white suit is red.
Several locks of hair fall forward
around the mask as she bends to her task
of chiseling, cleaning. I leave that whiteness behind.
Restoration
Decline is this blue dusk
sharp around the steeple
and a belltower’s edge,
in which street lamps glow orange
and shoes clatter on cobblestones.
A person or two stops
to speak of what they know
while hurrying past, and I listen
to their words pry the weight of darkness.
Wholly anonymous,
I watch light sink into stones.
I watch alleys, baroque facades,
shop fronts and fountains all slide
toward decay, and I grip them with sight
—this medieval church, for example,
its chiseled, elaborate face.
Inside, I find shadows draped
in chapels and on marble tombs
but I wander until the lines
of the paintings and sculptures fade
so much I see the way out
alone. There’s a little more light
outdoors, and I think of the church
left behind overspread with shadow
as I and the others leave,
of its hard and silent altar.
We resto
re the things we need
in mind; restore and preserve
with vision, or with fresh thought,
in passing only, the icons
established, not quite our own,
thus witnessed, and slightly altered,
as we walk through the holy city
(just as we move through a poem),
choosing what to let dim, what grace
with a transient inner light.
4
“The opposite [of death] is desire.”
—Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
Maenads
It traveled over the tall gates of our gardens,
our threshold stones,
his song about something done,
gone, lost, a body not touched again,
not like our bodies. We made him reckon them:
receptive flesh—our flesh!—he left behind
as flashes through the forest’s deformations
though he drew the animals near him
with that bodiless voice,
though even the trees leaned down,
even the stones crept close,
even the dead turned, groaned,
even Persephone,
half her life’s light drained
—that wisp!—was pricked to sympathy.
Sepulchres quaked.
A ripple rocked the underworld’s black veins
as a rain floods roots.
For something done,
for a girl who was far too simple,
who saw only a surface, not the peril
underneath, who ranged the fields
for loveliness, with a maiden’s erring sight—
just this, and this,
not what unwinds below
the wash of flowers on the meadow’s knoll.
Beyond the surface it is dark
and after you have seen it
you can’t go back.
It was his clutched mistake,
the dream that slid out of his arms.
Should he blame the dream?
Her own delight in the meadow?
The hell, or world, that underscores delight?
The blame attached to nothing. But his voice
took shape. For years we listened,
trying to turn his sight. How ignorant!
He had no more a body for a woman
than stones did. He surrounded himself with boys
as if returns to boyhood
would yank him out of time.
—Yet his song was about a girl
he loved as skin and bones.
It maddened us
to sense the pool of feeling in his song
denied by flesh.
By the time we tore it from his voice,