What was the point of a landscape’s allegories,
or the show of fractured bedrock in Bellini’s
Transfiguration, the way it caught the folding
and tightening, the rough-shod squeezing of old
strata, and the intrusion of the igneous, ferns’
scribbled tendrils, and wild flowers’ grotesque anthers,
clinging in cracks, the changing and unchanged?
Centre stage, Christ’s comedy was kitsch, a gaudy
feather dropped from time’s arrow. Heaven
and its wherewithal had sometime evanesced,
and those grey-beards posing for truth
in a streetwise selfie … exiled by horny youth.
Covert and patient, a mozzie waits for dusk.
You know the faint drone, those ridiculous drooping legs,
and, too late to react, the red
itch and the echo of a mother’s litany,
Don’t scratch. Soon it’ll pass, you’ll see.
Now, here you are again. Tapping floors
to sound the keyboard of marble corridors,
entering dim rooms with a breathless permesso
to square up, stiff and wide-eyed for the face off
with another last-things capolavoro,
waiting for the grant of recognition like passport control.
The city you would enter still denied.
The momentous intervention in time’s wheel denied.