Toledo
Virgin of the Good Milk
An Unknown Man
Assumption of Mary
Laocoön
Adoration of the Shepherds
Descent of the Holy Ghost
St. Joseph and the Child
St. Martin and the Beggar
Fray Hortensio Felix Paravicino

Toledo

 After cheese and peppers and broccoli and bread,

my eyes go back to Toledo, restive, stark, heart-fed,

one of eleven of El Greco's paintings at my feet,

where out of a cerulean mist, just where the moon

should be, the sky sucks on a burning candle,

a century of disillusion and disbelief clogging

the hole it vacuums sloppily into, all the avarice

and sloth, all the charity and gloom there is.

No terribilitá, no dolorous skulls of olive-black,

but rather teeny, friendly Giacometti girls

who skinny-dip, will-o'-the-wisp, peopling

the pelagic, ice-green fields of whiskey bush.

Nowhere near dawn, the river gushes waters

blowhard up to Puente Alcantara and the Alcazar,

the alimentary canals of a breathing, upsurged earth.

Virgin of the Good Milk

Twenty years ago, when I was twenty-one and first in love,

I sat and drew your face a thousand times,

trying to dictate the softness of carnelian--

the opacity of eyes--the possibility of an office

in delusion.  Here is a wreath of hands around a child,

my youngest brother, the lap I never had so blue

or sheen or supple, robes, undulous and flat enough

that dying ermine clung in the creases, the brushstrokes

bodies floating, as if in abstract expressionist collage,

like the Beckmann I sit before as I draw you now.

We'd met in Santiago once, I thought, but here

it's St. Anne's voice, and the sure, male posturing of Joseph

that brings alive the scarlets and the mustard seed,

the oleander smell four hundred years still melted

into honey.  The virgin's breasts, so full and veined

and pink, nonplussed, lead life to this child of mine,

to the whole planet's household with its latticed clouds

which sit in some god's machine for the Dioscuri.

But the theater is inside of me: the painting

quietly releases it, releases it through the good milk.

An Unknown Man

This portrait celebrates the physicality of earth,

seen through the eyes of a mystic, a wanderer come home,

a man no less like me than you my reader are.

A retrato mundial, a theater for the Pyrrhic mind,

paper-thin his lips that barely part

announce a shifting syllable, amor.

For it is love in the olive eyes, set in softest palettes

of plaster, sockets sunk but full of the dark-to-light

which presses the beam of soul along and through

the egg-whites gazing out, his long, inelegant

broken nose some half-assured ascendancy

of Bourbons or barrel-making artisans,

slumped into ax-hewn chairs sot full of port.

Most suppliant of flowers--an umber ilex

hidden in cottonwood bosques of Madrid, Valladolid,

the chestnut, tousled hair that's pocketed

by the same, grey-white hairs that fall

on my arms as I both write and look.

The lilt of eyebrows--from Crete, or Muscovite

harks back upon an impish wooing of the dark,

to the nine-year-old in each of us who cries

Why? cramped in a corner, weeping on a doll.

The inquisition in his stare is all benevolence,

all that church and state of Denmark smother.

It's lust, a last love for brother, friend, or lover.

His bullock shoulders, ewe's neck, are left unmodeled,

the signature in black-on-tar in Greek so flat

that the head thrusts out--a pistil of the most sexual

of plants--across the picture plane to me, hiding

what's ill in unsaid folds of an unarticulated room,

to my face and lips, as I both say and write this.

The mannered brushstroke, an Elizabethan will

to mottled dark of fifty varnishes, quells

whatever torment of emotions lays beneath it,

with welcome, familiarity, and easy bliss:

this is the face, known to us all, that we must kiss.

About the Artist

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