Caravaggio, by Susannah Lawrence

The Deposition of Christ, by Caravaggio (Italy) 1600-1604.

​Caravaggio

 Eyes that drink in the world --
how the hip bone juts
under Christ’s taut skin
as body is lowered into tomb,
how two disciples,
faces harrowed by labour,
by suffering, brace him
and it’s awkward,
the way it would be,
their faces the ones
he lives among in Rome,
in the poorer quarters,
faces of peasants in the hills
where he was a child,
with their black-rimmed nails,
their grimy bare soles
no one else will paint
and that get him in trouble,
 
as do the whores,
he makes into Mary,
with milk-heavy breasts
and too much cleavage,
though churchmen still buy --
off the record --
for private pleasure,
and as he honours
men’s working hands
so their bared torsos,
unscarred and white
as Carrarra marble but also
doe-eyed, juicy boys
as angels, minstrels
or sun-flushed Bacchus.
He honours violence too,
the burn of it, the pride
in his body’s tinder --
a tavern insult flaring
into brawl and daggers drawn,
into blooded streets.
 
That pimp, Tomassoni,
stabbed and dead,
he’s on the run now --
Naples, Sicily, Malta --
painting in small rooms,
back streets,
his images bleaker,
shallows of light,
on black-brown fields  --
the dark of well-rotted dung,
of what lived broken down --
bitumen, ivory black,
burnt umber --
his subjects wedged
in a thin plane
between frame and void.
 
As is his David,
holding at arm’s length
Goliath’s severed head,
mouth hanging open,
roar gone, right eye ajar,
death-clouded,
the left wide, its rage
still lit — his own likeness,
his own face,
 
while David, beautiful,
looks a bit turned off
but mostly sad,
as if he knows, like us,
where this is heading --
toward one last canvas --
where St. Ursula
eyes the arrow stuck
like a strange insect
in her breast.
And Caravaggio,
eyes filmed, blind even,
tilts his face to a light
he’s letting go.

Only one painting ever signed,
as if with his finger, in blood.

Susannah Lawrence

Susannah Lawrence lives in northwest Connecticut,  the rocky part. She holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in Nimrod, The Cortland Review, The MacGuffin, Poet Lore, The Comstock Review and Green Hills Literary Lantern. Her full length collection, Just Above the Bone, was published in 2016 by Antrim House Press.