città del vaticano

You know that I know, my lord, that you know
That I draw close to take pleasure in you,
And you know that I know that you know who I am;
So why do you delay our acknowledging each other?
If true is the hope that you give to me,
If true is the great desire that I've been given,
Let the wall between them be broken down,
For doubly violent are concealed woes.
If I only love in you, my dearest lord,
That which you love in yourself, do not scorn
Because one spirit has fallen in love with another.
That which I desire and learn from your beautiful face
Is imperfectly comprehended by human minds:
Who wishes to know it must first die.

by Michelangelo Buonarroti to Tommaso Cavalieri (around 1532), the inspiration for the image of Christ in the Last Judgment





XLVI

If you ask me, I will admit:
I prefer the way the Masters saw it,
the way they saw me and you-

body is the spirit's echo,
its likeness glimmered back
from the skin's unbroken mirror,
gazing at itself.

And so, in Rome,
up and down the Sistine Chapel altar,
and scrolled out across the nave,
the frank and vaulted ceiling,

the body's glorious cursive
may be seen to squiggle everywhere,
and bleed.

Massive reclining sibyls,
sages and saints with muscled arms
and calves, and in the center
of this storm of burnished forms,

a warrior-god stands tall, his chest as creamy
as virgin marble, come to judge
over a lush but vanished world.

A well-known lore:
on the day of its unveiling,
Rome's mitered royalty blushed and hid
behind their mittened hands.

Faced with Michelangelo's vision
of pink delirious flesh,
they all were taken ill, forlorn, betrayed.

A temporary state it was,
for the world had yet to remember,
embrace the faith all artists keep:

god is body, bright beautiful body,
or else why must he be worshipped,
why must he be god?

by J. Neil C. Garcia (Kaluluwa, UST Press, 2001)