Strap on your stilts & raise a wreath to the monument.
For Leonardo’s missing rib, a sundial in a sun extinct
prepare a flood of adjectives. To the tranquil, pious hands.
(Her bald head’s no mistake, should you decide.)
The two-dimensional made concrete… & yet
it’s the ambivalent you climb to find, the famous ‘absent’.
Do squint. Far in the background, almost invisible
is Judas, patron saint of suicides, hanging from a dead branch
& further, beyond the frame, the movement of light –
Turner’s yellow fever, the vapour of cattle urine
collected in the mango orchards of Bihar –
India’s yellow dye that Leonardo chose to hide.
Her heart, smaller than a sparrow’s, sleeps patiently.
In the name of brilliant pigments, on Aug. 21, 1911
Vincenzo Peruggia will sneak from the dark broom closet
to rescue & drag her home – there, dimmed
by applications of varnish, humidity kept at 50% ±10%
her skin cracked only slightly. Obscured by death,
behind the coarse landscape, Leonardo crawls under
the warping panel to touch-up a faded eyebrow.
The decision’s yours. Argue Turner couldn‘t manage figures
but no one could steal his light. Scars & wrinkles, Yes. Still
da Vinci’s dry rocks, the aqueduct, the whole list of despair
fails the testimony of the fluorescent, omnivorous halo
of Turner’s scoundrel veil.
William Turner saturates such paintings as Ovid Banished from Rome in his signature Indian yellow – for ‘the painter of light’ it was immaterial whether Ovid actually appears on the canvas (see here).
Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian patriot employed at the Louvre, abducted the Mona Lisa & kept her in his apartment, hidden for two years.
________
Marty Newman was born in Czechoslovakia, raised in Montreal, Canada, educated at McGill University & lives in Jerusalem where he studies ancient languages & texts. The modern poets he most admires are Dan Pagis, Richard Wilbur, Zbigniew Herbert & Vasko Popa.
Nine of Marty’s poems appear in the current issue (CK 31:1) of Common Knowledge (published by Duke University). His poems also appear in Image Journal, in The Raritan Quarterly Review (Rutgers University) & in Britain, in Standmagazine (Leeds University). In Israel, his poems have appeared numerous times in arc (Tel-Aviv) & in The IlanotReview.