Poetry
Deen, Rosemary
POETRY: Rosemary Deen INFANT AND MARTYRS For Anne Robertson The infant Christ begins as lamb or mangercd animal. In paintings he touches the pelt his infant cousin already wears. Or curved into...
...The natural human core mother and child, casts an easy naturalness over it all...
...Blinded by evidence we carve shapes out of it...
...Back of the Sistine altar Michaelancelo painted himself as St...
...John, animal skin swaddled in crimson bends into his reading...
...The niceness of angelic rescue lifts merely the tip of Abram's sword...
...In Venice, infant mother & saints, city & botany-come forward to a white cloth on the ground unfurling whited light in folds...
...But they were young and learned love from Plato...
...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...
...Powerful beauty embeds the tortured death of all these persons in a sprczzatura 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...
...Or curved into his mother's arm he is flanked by martyrs...
...Having suffered, Mantegna's martyrs are bookish...
...Lawrence the cruelest tortured one here the most beautiful stands just touching his grill...
...Power over others implies the sacrifice of the weak...
...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...
...Idea longs for Archetype...
...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 matter of suffering in an earlier age was inescapable: squalor the unrelieved liabilities of the body, and torment commonplace...
Vol. 116 • December 1989 • No. 22
