Photograph: Temptation Saint Francis Preaching to the Birds Saint Nicholas Providing Dowries to Three Virgins Calling of Apostles Peter and Andrew Annunciation/Expulsion
Gallagher, Jean
Photograph: Temptation (Duccio, Temptation on the Pinnacle of the Temple, 1308/1311) Here's one of me up on hunger's balcony, my head just emerging from the gold smog of childhood, my ideas still...
...1430) Inside, the house open like a doll's, The done deal is just starting to settle over the leaning-toward and -away of arched walls, lily, her averted, attentive face...
...The girls spin inside their lives, all their luck reversible until this hour's gears re-engage and the stories put in motion take on their increasingly plausible, unforeseeable freight...
...Saint Francis Preaching to the Birds (Workshop of Giotto, ca...
...Coins just bearing the weightless, inflated expense of the possible float like empty gold planets over the bed's red continent...
...It feels like wealth this floating world the nets you've made that fit your hands the rustling of something more, maybe swimming around you...
...What now what messy fatal limelight leaking into the sky...
...The old fixed polar stars, transmitter and receiver, fade in this attention's pure gold nowhere...
...Photograph: Temptation (Duccio, Temptation on the Pinnacle of the Temple, 1308/1311) Here's one of me up on hunger's balcony, my head just emerging from the gold smog of childhood, my ideas still stuck to my back like new wings...
...They are crossing out of their companioned solitude among the animals, the intelligent upstanding rabbits and red edible flowers, their feet curving carpet needles in the blue-green domestic grasses they are turning to leave...
...1308) You're right in the middle of your life boat on open water green and lively as moss...
...Outside, the future is blowing its gold hurricane...
...Omnilect and legible, he speed-reads light as speech empties into it...
...Behind him, his brother monk signals in their shared, resistant language the more usable, solid fictions no realer than this but more insistent...
...1300) Birds drop like consonants and vowels from a single tree, array themselves in alphabetic ranks that spell the sermon back to him...
...But you can feel listening's empty cup filling filling with the sound of your name rhyming with everything else...
...Jean Gallagher...
...Crossing into next, its gravities, necessities, haphazard plots...
...But the future is stepping along the sharp coastline of peripheral vision its thunder is gilding your ears with something you may or may not have heard before...
...He leans treelike and reaches into what's reading him out loud, the weightless shine between the denser, flying syllables...
...OK so the fish were just an idea you had the roughest of sketches really and yet you were sure they weighed something your back still hurt when you hauled them in...
...Saint Nicholas Providing Dowries to Three Virgins (Bicci di Lorenzo, 1433) He gives a push with one foot and sets the room spinning...
...Annunciation/Expulsion (Fra Angelico, ca...
...Oh the trouble they gave me on the way down, not because they didn't open but because they did, catching on all the invisible, simple machinery of the air, all I had to trust to when I cast myself down into my life, jumped away from the shadow-parent, the formal exams, the temptation to stay suspended in perfect thirst forever...
...Calling of Apostles Peter and Andrew (Duccio di Buoninsegna, ca...
Vol. 130 • February 2003 • No. 4
