Verse:

...The man's eyes are slits in the moment...

...The gold leaf lit up the word of God, The vast colours shone on the vellum like jewels...

...I cry for you in your bewilderment...

...The baby is bewildered...

...the rosed lady sleek in velvet glowing like the nap on a fruit, her horse sad with his mane long rippling in the curls of a fairy prince...

...There is nothing more to me than this...

...Jesus already has left the womanly embrace of the Mother, has left the developing hints of breasts and knees beneath the cloth, gone to rule in a heaven of gold from Byzantium, blank, otherworldly, stern in judgment, waiting for the vision of hulking Masaccio, and a return to humanity...

...Thomas Ramey Watson On Botticelli's "Madonna of the Magnificat" From her fine-boned face with slightly-parted lips, her heavy-lidded eyes look down to pen her song of the right hand and humble heart, helped by the Christ child on her lap, who with his right hand guides the Virgin in words of praise...

...Better the way of the Magdalene, what she became in the bright world of medieval scripts, the Botticellian goddess of detachment and long limbs, swaying with faint opulence of a double chin, polished as porcelain, with arms shining bare from the ascetic shirt of her down-flowing hair...

...Too much of the earth for abstraction yet lovely as wind, I would soar like a prayer that asks for nothing, only perhaps for the privilege of conversation...

...She pinches her nose upon meeting three dead, the souls of their death she will not let breathe on her face...

...Zona Teti Florentine Painters After Giotto (for Ruby Zagoren) At daybreak on mountains in cloisters the good life began...

...deaths, their births, as Mary touches Eve, and Christ, Adam...

...Five angels, like open wounds exude sweet nectar their eyes on Mary, on Christ below, and above: two angels, with left hand and right, on either side crown the circlets of Mary's veiled and golden hair with a twelve-pointed corona of Florentine gold filigree and stars numerous as pomegranate and Abraham's seed Madonna's breath utters praises constant as the sun which shines down from above and crowns all with the Spirit's gold...

...Letters curled into vines, and each majuscule became a world shimmering with distance, visionary, under the pens of monks steeped in eternity, with a window to the north light and their brows shining...

...But sweet as incense I rise up to you with words of love it is my delight to breathe, what words will become the song of our son, caressing your heart .your will, your need...

...Human and angelic hands combine with God to hold the pomegranate of his ancient pledge Over the apple of the earth and under providential skies, all is gold, and breathes his orient praise...

...Bordering the tondo, the purple-hued rainbow of the Father's eternal fiat, the immanence and mercy of the Son, circles in shades that betoken his royal birth, and death Beginnings touch their ends...

...Below, the angels and demons hovered in the grim air, coiled ready for souls newly sprung from plague-dark bodies, the souls ascending in the form of babies...

...The left hand of Mary rests upon the left hand of Christ, which holds a partly-opened pomegranate Messed fruit God ortained to be the frieze on sapient Solomon's temple: its seeds, like God's blessings and Abraham's fruit, are manifold...

...But never could I have been one to float to shore, slender-stemmed as a flower, upborne on a shell rimmed with gold, my atmosphere green and mist...

...Zona Teti Christinas Poem of the Lukan Mary If I had been born in the desert among ideals, my life would have failed me, my shoulders unknown to the hug of friends, my voice song-heavy and mute, my self eternal like a still life of spilled-out fruit...

...One that my heart cries for, a man with eyes closed in the act of death, his soul as a baby not yet out of his mouth, and already a devil has snatched it...

...She will not cry...

...In cases of doubt, an angel took the arm, a devil the leg, swaying him in the air like a garland for their dance...

...she believes in escape...

...with walls sheer as mountains and as calm...

...Sorrows shot up like arrows but fell short of the glory: austere, sublime, one more level up...

...Even the angels that flew to attendance streamed back in the supple haze of pagan winds, their silks fading into light held softly in the distance...