La Cathedral, Clermont-Ferrand, France
Leonardo, “The Adoration”
...the world...streaming
In the electrolysis of love.
--Kenneth Rexroth
What has held me so long
before this painting? The awe-stricken crowd
cascade like swept leaves at her feet,
a few small angels among them blossoming
light. And the wild heads of the horses,
their eyes whorled with fear, rise
like the spume of a beaten sea. War
and strife cloud the distance,
held off from this center as if by
centrifugal force. At the still eye,
mother and child, their bodies brushed
with light. The tree lifts above them
its dense speech.
Unfinished? Or perhaps
the way to tell a story more than the sum
of men and events. As if it were not
the clustered, turbulent figures
he wanted to show, not these at all,
but the molecular dance, the invisible in The Sow’s Ear,
stream that pulses in this scene, Pushcart Nomination
the godstuff itself. To see--not through
but into-- every filled thing, even & in Color Documentary
the paint and the tense bristles
remembering their roots in skin
as they wash over everything a gold light.
So that, in this dusky, troubled pond,
great doors swing wide:
There is the tree
drinking and speaking the pure I am,
milk that feeds all hungers
rising through pores of ancient canvas
in a thousand springs.
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