For Anne Robertson 

     The infant Christ begins as lamb 
or mangered animal. In paintings 
he touches the pelt his infant
cousin already wears. Or 
curved into his mother’s arm 
he is flanked by martyrs. 

     The natural human core 
mother and child, casts 
an easy naturalness over it all. 
Having suffered, Mantegna’s martyrs
are bookish. John, animal
skin swaddled in crimson
bends into his reading. Lawrence
the cruelest tortured one
here the most beautiful
stands just touching his grill. 

     Outside on the doors a primitive
bronze Isaac is perched in a nest
of faggots like a young stork
his other ram self, briar-meshed
looks like a lion. The niceness
of angelic rescue lifts
merely the tip of Abram’s sword. 
Elsewhere urgency heightens grace as 
column-compressed, heels aloft
the angel in a piercing vertical
seizes Abram’s wrist
to stop the knife’s descent. 

     The matter of suffering
in an earlier age was 
inescapable: squalor
the unrelieved liabilities
of the body, and torment commonplace. 
But they were young and learned
love from Plato. 
Idea longs for Archetype. 
Blinded by evidence 
we carve shapes out of it. 

     In Venice, infant
mother & saints, city & botany
come forward to a white cloth
on the ground unfurling
whited light in folds. 
Power over others implies
the sacrifice of the weak. 
Powerful beauty embeds the tortured
death of all these persons
in a sprezzatura emblem
of the painter’s mastery
purified of his own labor
a silken whole, unsweated
sweet with glory—I
for one will not resist it. 

     Back of the Sistine altar
Michaelancelo painted
himself as St. Bartholomew and 
holds out to us his flayed
skin hanging in smoky folds
still human
in the downward drowned
lines of the face—sacrifices to the other Plato
all reason & justice
going on around him.