ANDREA DI BARTOLO, Madonna and Child with the Four Evangelists, 1400 - 1410, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.
Angels whisper behind a screen,
bright wings of red and gold,
butterflies of God
gossiping about the ways of man
in the yawning manner of immortals.
A woman sits on a throne with a tired gaze.
Being a mother is exhausting
even if you are the Queen of Heaven.
Four men surround her, eager courtiers,
risen to divinity
because they were such diligent note takers,
because they saw something they had never seen before
and wrote it down.
The writer in a tangerine robe looks out through time,
finding our gaze across the great expanse of centuries,
piercing the veil with dark, knowing eyes.
Do you see? he asks,
Do you see what is happening; what has happened?
Do you see what I have brought you here to witness?
He is the artist,
he is God, he is the apostles, he is death and life,
and all the glinting grains of history
spill out from the painting
into the present;
a glittering cascade that comes to rest upon the floor
and seeps slowly into me, like diamonds into mud.
I stare back, meeting a dead man who is still alive
in that place of light and gold
where no one ever dies,
and angels talk of other things
behind the gilded screen
that keeps us out of heaven. ❧
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