After Mattia Preti of Malta’s The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew

After Mattia Preti of Malta’s

The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew

Held steady enough, still

the reflection in the cup

tips the way the sky will

when I lean over it too

drunk on vertigo to know

it’s not solid, it’s really

falling up sky.  I’ve been

months from such a stomach,

but even this mug of mud

brown coffee’s enough

to see me looking down

looking up.  If I hold it

at the right length before

I tip it onto my lip and just

below my nose (the steam:

it’s sixteen degrees out-

side is a quiet applause

in this hat- and- scarf

room), I see the Blessed

Mother on a cloud, those

three children, and

a flock of lambs,
some sheep. And one of the lambs
looks at me, completely

ignorant of the lift in the sky, the foot

all flesh on the cloud

completely unshocked

she doesn’t fall through—

because she’s solid as

those two girls and the one

boy clutching one each, his

heart and his shepherd’s

crook.   She’s come to them

and revealed hell

and salvation that nobody

will believe, not for a long

long time.  Why did she

not come to me the angry

tight pious nuns provoke

in their cells at night

while they prod and grope

their unholy loneliness?

But that one lamb.  I’m

remembering the faces that keep

rising up out of Mattin

Preti of Malta’s painting

of the Martyrdom of Saint

Bartholomew, how I’m at first

fixed by his looking up

at the coffee colored sky

that must be illuminating

his skin in some miracle

and I’m surprised I’ve only

recently seen his right

arm, the skin is peeled

right down to his wrist

but how is it the faces looking

through the storm I’ve only

now just…but now I can’t

look at his face at all without

wondering at the silhouette

in the left corner, a slave

maybe taking, the way

an anchor may, the un-

steady but expected weight

of all it’s cast out to

contain, it’s him stuck

in the wind and weight

of the second coming, and

closer on, the rain that clutches (but they’re

off canvas, flexing I bet,

thumb tucked under

the fingers can’t you imagine

it’s nothing but this, that boy,

how is he different looking

at a Jesus disciple from the boy

looking at Jesus’s mother.  Or

more, how are those, the man

and the woman, both known

both thrown to the dogs when

the road’s come to be cleaned

when the sky breaks open

and the sheep scatter, the clatter

of their little hooves muted

as they splash through

mud that just moments

before reflected not cloud

not Mary not Bartholomew

backing away toward Armenia

but instead what can be

said to be called a perversity,

the crowd still gawking, their

faces coming up through

the clouds and mist at the now

saint’s elbow, or the children

the three with their knees

bent and the hovering She

draped and robed in gold,

flesh and bone

but only, brief as skin

with its thin thin protection

its excruciating, like sometimes

reflecting, being blinded,
then coming away.

Gladiolus, Chrysanthemums

Gladiolus, Chrysanthemums

And yet, haven’t we each attempted that trick, desiring

ourselves into wideness, more wideness, until we are lost?

                                                              the Mesmer

                                                             Jane Hirshfield

Like most people you shortened the main

name of the flowers you loved best,

the eventually top-heavy gladiola and the afro-

spread chrysanthemum.  And don’t both

need to winter over somehow, in the dark,

on the rocky cellar shelf after opening box

after box at Christmas time, because your mother-

in-law knew she couldn’t go wrong giving

you the mums.  She was capable of such

a quiet and lengthy nourishing as that, hands

through all your winters, but sitting, sitting

in her dormant sheath.  Still, she let you dig

the requirements she taught you early on, in early

spring, and to wait for mid-summer for the color

to break out into your gloomy world.  And she’d

bring a pot or two of mums, and leave them

on the doorstep for you when you wouldn’t

open the door to her, and they’d immediately

go to rust under your care.  You didn’t dead-head

anything but your children, other than what was
offered by chance from the sky and often
your cats who backed up

to let fly a spray of piss that was so wide

reaching it could be tasted in the living room if

the window was open.  And those poor gladiolas:

stalky, blossoms all on one side like flute

holes, opening up on the stem with that precision

coded in them: to open when the sun, when the rain,

when the fog…but always on a day you weren’t at

your best or even wanting to be, all day

granting favor unpredictably, or taking it

in just the same way, with blushed and boisterous

fury sometimes, or quite casually, almost bored

with it all, and usually when the whole

kit and kaboodle had come on and the glads, the best

ones, the ones we’d all been holding out for given

the picture on the box.  When I called you about

the killed boy, my friend, I bet you were on your way
to the garden.  He was the one who used to hit me hard

(but in fun he said) and I let him, who taught me
how to shoot a gun, in the woods, all day that one day  

aching in the deeper shadows and we were out
of the houses we both lived in, how we were
shivering with impact like those flowers:

how they rose up from the ground and opened all

at once, high on in their entire vibrancy, so hopped up

on it in fact, so that knowing anything about coming down

after such a flourish was impossible.  Because when
I call I imagine, like I said, you’re on your way
to the lawn, and you’re blown over,
you’re streaked with mud but otherwise ok, full bloom, taken

off just above the ground level, neither shocked

nor silent, because the season has arrived, it has

finally arrived and before we have a chance to remember

how much we’d both planted and when, and where,

(because later you’d let the flowerbeds go

to grass) I see you take the scissors that afternoon

even though you’re a little drunk, and when the rain

cleared I set you to salvage a ravished section

of a bent two or three unstaked stalks, and take them in

gently as I’ve ever seen you touch anything, to the water-

filled vase you'd dropped an asprin in, and walk a mile
down the road, glass and stagger, to the window
of his mother, just then

gone to make arrangements herself, to weed through

and pick the best, the very best, out of what has fallen.