1.

Window barred.

Door wide open.

A dove’s gold music

came through the wall.

2.

Everybody’s reading

but not books.

On the arch

a smaller person asks the larger

to be good to him or her,

to tell the truth,

When such things happen

God is directly overhead:

a gold stain

in a plain sky.

3.

Angel and prelate are kneeling here:

.

The prelate is a saint but who?

Somebody knows his name

but who?

What a young face he has,

younger than the angel’s even

who lives in the quietest suburb of time.

The angel’s headband

looks like the uraeus,

Egypt serpent wisdom roused

the halo hardly fits.

There is a quiet argument–

a lily or a city

which is the best gift?

And who is giving?

4.

There seems to be no end

to what this picture is talking about.

In all this beauty

the mind can find no rest.

5.

But what a beautiful street

we also live on.

6.

And she is reading a book.

She probably thinks

all the gold behavior round her,

the ray that finds and pierces her

the ecstasy that fills her up

is happening in her head

because of what she’s reading,

that everything comes

out of this rapturous text

before which she’s actually kneeling

as if reading is the same as praying.

Or tell me how it’s different.

The golden dove-line

lands in her forehead.

(How is it different?)

She is reading

the ancient history of this very moment.

Everything is written

in the act of reading.

Long skinny fingers

folded reverently

across her breast.

Reverent she bends forward–

but maybe a little bit

she is protecting her body

from the insolent moment, the god.

7.

Angel and other one waiting outside,

waiting for the golden bee-line

to do its work.

She is captured by what she thinks,

she kneels before the word.

They kneel outside, each on one knee only

ready for flight

or to rise in copious explanation

of what she knows already

better than they ever could

though it is they who will rise,

step through the open door and tell.

Later. A city on a hill.

Or an angel’s naked hand

to comfort and tell.

8.

Qui venit, tell, qui venit

tell who is coming

in nomine Domini, tell

a mass by Fux, the time

is wrong, the words are right,

the golden light

falling through the wall

tells her someone is coming

she’ll have to know the name

someday soon

she’ll make it up, who comes,

who is coming

to me now, coming in the name

of the Lord, coming down

along the circuits of the name

and speaking into me now?

9.

I hear the mass but there are no prayers in the picture,

angel and pontiff, teacher and student,

lover and seducer, orator and those to be persuaded,

all of it is striving, dealing, merchandising,

all except this little girl praying

who is striving only with herself

and the slender golden line

that means her such exquisite harm.

10.

The number of people in the picture

keeps changing.

So do the birds.

The birds fly in and out, the birds settle and unsettle.

Sometimes there’s a bird for every person,

sometimes fewer sometimes more.

Birds are like that, all in and out.

People are so slow, though,

weighed down with identity and other merchandise.

How many people are there tonight?

Four, or only three, in the far-off courtyard.

A garden is beyond the furthest wall

and surely there are even more people in there

hidden from me, safe,

taking their ease, having no cares, indifferent

to this girl and her book, to angel and dove.

And maybe one of them looks like the gardener.

11.

Tonight I can see thirteen birds

counting the Holy Ghost.

The numbers are not always the same.

Sixteen human figures

counting an angel a bishop

and a child. Is a bishop

human? Is a child?

12.

For a long time I thought that far off

beyond the garden wall was a tower,

a curious rounded pagoda shaped affair,

a faint pale lingam in the Lombard air.

Tonight with a magnifying glass I see

that it’s a tree, bent systematically

to the left, like a larch or deodar,

so the downward leftward curve of each

branch shapes by occult lines

(Klee’s phrase, from his Sketch Book)

the shape of the tower, just as before.

What a strange way to treat a tree,

Crivelli. To make me see an orient

in the ordinary. Half of me lives in it

already, making the best I can

of your transparent walls.

13.

One woman just appeared tonight,

she walked into a small doorway

in the middle distance and seems

uncertain of whether to stand there

or continue her indoor stroll.

She moves at right angles to the door.

Going where. (And one new bird too,

a dove in a little pigeonhole

far up the stucco wall.) The woman

might be reading something or

looking at her keys. The door’s open.

There’s some funny business with a line

that cuts across her hip and continues

across the street, running down the brick.

What am I to make of this? She wears

a tall hat, almost a miter or a crown.

I want to think she is reading

exactly what I am writing now.

14.

And here it is.

A bird in the house.

Something terrible

must be happening.

All the normal registers

confused. Birds

in houses. God

in a girl’s womb.

Our family has a geis, a curse or condition or taboo,

that says: no living bird in the house.

When my grandfather lay sick, a neighbor

brought two pigeons in to kill for pie.

Upstairs, far out of sight, my grandfather

rose up in bed, cried Get those birds

out of my house, and died.

15.

There is a pale, grayish Adriatic light

about the day. The glory

down which the dove rides to find her

comes not from the sky

but from a hole in the sky

like the upside-down image

of water splashing up

when a stone falls into the pond.

Something has fallen

upward into heaven

and let the light out.

The light runs down

to take refuge in a girl.

16.

The book she is reading,

I can’t see the page.

It engrosses her intelligence,

the bird will have a hard time

getting her attention.

I want to see the page beneath her gaze.

Is the book she’s reading

the same book she will have been reading later,

a book in the wind, a candle

flickering in daylight

beyond the dead body she holds

years and years later, who knows

how many, in the Brera Pietà?

It is open on a bookstand

beyond Saint John.

For all we know, the Virgin’s eyes

might still be fixed on the page,

far-sighted eyes of an old woman

now, easier to focus on the distant book

than the skin a few inches away,

body of her dead son.

Are these two paintings

images of the same instant,

perils of reading, perils

of letting an idea into the mind,

a bird into the house?

The book she was reading

in the Annunciation contains

the whole history of what is to come.

This moment is wrapped in that moment,

as securely as death is wrapped in birth,

as the Redemption is wrapped in the Incarnation.

Are all books contained in any book?

Learning how to read

(bend your body to the page,

it is the body that reads

the real meaning of the words,

the eyes just dance).

We could rename this painting

“The Reading Lesson,”

all the classes of society,

wild life, birds of the air

all flock to one who reads

to tell her what is there,

there, beneath her dancing eyes,

her slim intelligent mouth

that will hold whatever secrets

the page discloses. The page

before her, the page Crivelli

sets before me. But when I look

at Page 237 in Zampetti’s monograph

I see the actual page

the mother reads beyond the son

it looks like a page of Mirsuvian

Calligraphy, my ‘own’ invention,

the invention of anyone who wants to write

and has no words, squiggles of writing-like

worms and angles, red and black,

writing that only the soul can understand,

writing the other side of language.

Signs that are signs of nothing

or only of what happens in my head

when I look through the flicker

at the red questions and the black answers.

Whatever it is they see there

it makes the dreamy girl imagine,

makes the old woman weep to understand.

What she read lies cold beneath her hand.

17.

Who is that scruffy character,

you can practically smell him,

making the universal gesture of

transaction, pay me, gimme,

hand open demanding

from the comfortable big fellow

examining something this vendor

–that’s what he must be, the runt,

caveat emptor! –has offered —

it looks like Confederate money–

or is he selling what’s in the crate

–a monkey or yet another bird —

or else the shapely tree in a tree-pot,

is life for sale?

This is the Renaissance,

everything is for sale. The poor man

is greedy (that’s why he’s poor —

does Ficino tell us this, or Bruno?),

ill-dressed, his hair a mess.

Yet this transaction is directly underneath

the glory of God.

These characters (dubious seller,

too-comfortable doubtful buyer)

are closer to the Divine Light

than Mary is. What does this mean?

The class struggle

is the meaning of history.

Any light there is in the picture

rational, knowable,

tractable, divine,

illuminates that,

the conflict, the scruffy

poor man and the glib aristo.

They are us, rich and poor,

big and little, prosperous and needy,

greedy, on rooftops which are arches

which are bridges over spaces

which are roads from one wall

to another, who live in houses

but stand outside them terrified,

not even one of them looking

up at the sky, we stand in areaways

in alleys in courtyards between

one house of life and another,

we are them, the ordinary everybody

for whose sake this whole bizarre

business of a bird from heaven,

virgin mother, god on scaffold,

dead man talking with his friends,

a book comes on a visit, a book

no one can understand, all of it,

everything comes down. Comes

for us. Sometimes businessmen

haggle to keep from crying.

From doing what we always do.