POEMS
THE SAINT IN THE PICTURE
Sometimes he rooms in a small cave, his patch
of heaven furnished with a skull, a bench,
a fawning lion daintily
couchant,
a table on which lies an open book.
Sometimes-all mission, no portfolio–
dragging the swank of Venice toward a ship
no bigger than a shell, puffed up, he sails
to bag some gorgeous ape-like emperor.
He's whole; as full of virtue as an egg.
He dominates the ground and the foreground,
and seems most potent when he's sitting still.
His anguish reaches only to his eyes.
His self-possession's almost total, yet
he never quite sees what he's looking at–
neither that landscape in whose distances
a tiny dukedom flames, nor that melee
of long-haired children fleeing the black swords
of soldiers who, for reasons far beyond
his ken, wear purple stockings freaked with gold.
Asserting, mindlessly, that he's elect,
he saunters sometimes through a colonnade,
descends a stairs, or crosses a piazza,
to find that his mere being, charged with light,
commands the hawk-like princes to their knees,
and urges beggars from their bundled sleep.
Wound up in an idea of God, he cuts
a loving figure
yet
remains unloved.
