Sienese Variations

With candor, the devil (silhouetted, visage effaced, torso highlighted with

   criss-cross scratches

As if someone had tried to rid the world of this image of evil with an icepick)

Points down from the height of the temple's crenellation. Jesus rebukes the

   challenge.

Down here, a quorum of pigeons preens and paces between a swath of sunlight

And a colonnade of skewed shadows, congregates and lifts—one body—

subsumed in glare.

~

The headache keeps me from the apprehension of immanence.

I stand in the shade of battlements, towers, the wall's embrasures,

   heat-stung, dizzy, disoriented.

Through some gift of intuition, perhaps,

                                                               I know what it is I do not know.

I construct an I who senses, in the stark Siena noon, God with us,

Among us, in us. By us I mean only the I and only for that instant.

~

~

I've been known to stand at a height ( in a bell tower, on the catwalk

   circumscribing a cathedral's dome)

And to imagine the stepping out and off, the curve of, the acceleration of the fall,

And to imagine the distance of the fall

                                                            as three or four seconds of calm, of

   anonymity,

Three or four seconds without misgivings, retractions, or apologia,

An amplitude of lightness in which, despite evidence to the contrary, one

seems to levitate.