The Wilton Diptych, by Clara McLean

The Wilton Diptych, artist not known (nation not known, possibly England, France, Italy, or Germany) c. 1395-1399

​The Wilton Diptych
 
What was it about
that small, paneled
painting on wood,
hinged like a box
and kept quiet
for centuries?
 
Was it the wonder
of its preservation
for six hundred years,
so fresh that the colors
still glow as though molten--
lazuli, gold, vermillion?
 
What were you seeing
there, mother, now seven
years gone, when you
went to look at it
year after year, so
struck it stayed with you
even when you’d lost yourself?
 
You guided me through it
as I held the picture
over your hospital bed,
though your mouth 
slurred to one side,
and you could not
lift your head. See
 
that blue, gold so godly
they could make a king kneel?
There he is, Richard II,
on the left inner panel,
his blush still uncracked,
as three saints present him
to the facing heavens. 
See how the saints’ hands
incline toward his head,
as a mother might guide
a child new to walking.
 
For awhile, you could still speak
of craft, innovations
in paint, in proportion. 
Respite from thought loops
that troubled you, your pleas
to be walked out of there,
back into a life
once lavish with pigment,
divinity you
could believe in.
 
On the right side, the angels
in unfaded blues
crowd around the virgin and child. 
They look drugged
with color as they bless
England, hold up
her streaming pennant.
Everything’s moving
and everything’s still.
The infant Christ, here,
will never grow up, never
suffer, suspended.
Angels’ angular wings
at the back of the scene
curtain off the world
of immortals.
 
Was it the sense
of a shuttered past swung open,
still vibrant, unveiling itself?
Was it the mystery
of the work’s unknown maker,
like you, now, a closed
box, unanswering?
 
There’s a gap in the wings
right above Mary’s head.
Mom, what did you know
about that? Or about
the strange way she holds
the child’s foot,
her fingers encircling it
in a perfect O,
tipping the tiny thing up so its sole
faces us, as if to say:
here it is, always here,
the untouched, in its
untrodden softness--
might this be
miracle enough?

Clara McLean

Clara McLean lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Earlier poems have appeared in Rattle, Cider Press Review, Terrain.org, Foglifter, West Trestle Review, and Berkeley Poetry Review, among other publications.