JAMES HATCH
Leonardo
In the marketplace, doves freed from a brisk
Magician's sleeve or pocket flash in the hand.
At the level of shins and knees, gilded frames
For sale; students' copies of Old Masters,
Cleaned and stripped, reflecting in our faces
Deities, stripped. You are addressed as
maestro;
Your careful boy walks after, cloaked and armed.
A preacher paces to the side, recounting Hell,
And after re-enacted flames, some search
The ashes (fiery globules, squirming brass),
And the quick, burned fingers, like birds' beaks, peck
For leavings: glass-plugs, hinges, gilt-melt, nails.
An ivory button and one will crow! Follow
That woman for her hideous face: the stale
Cheeks and frown-recording caliper lines,
The enameled eyes that stare and do not see:
They must be drawn; and the girlish boy who turns
Slyly away, and, drinking water from
A gargoyle spout, smiles. Water slicks stone jaws.
(He'll come to chat you up, and sing a pretty song:
Once listen, and that song will never end.)
Coins for vendors: an exchange. Doff your plumed hat,
Trouble open cages, watch the doves take wing,
Swiftly climbing to a certain level's wind.
Twenty years at study of the body (God
That have made me a worm!), gaining undertaker's
Knowledge of the places prayer begins;
Where you have seen the leak of blood into
Forbidden quarters; noted atrophy ,
Dysfunction, dysmorphology; rendering
An endless, toward reportage of disaster
In the language of scientific curiosi ty.
A worm has made its nest where prayers most brood.
"Subject prepared in the usual manner."
The woman died young, breasts unshrivelled still;
I found the fat that clawed her heart, no mercy-
