The rill of blood from rib to thigh; tendons
stretched taut, gravity’s ache straining through;
flesh the weathered ochre of exhumed bone—
Brunelleschi’s Christ shook Donatello so,
he dropped his basket of eggs. Eras later,
outside Santa Maria Novella,
a nursing mother’s breast turned sootier
with each step we took, her day’s pool of lira
collecting in her skirt-lap, flies on the orbits
of her infant’s eyes. Sights from a honeymoon,
reposited in memory—like our coin
after coin to light the angels, saints, lunettes—
along with the noise of Christ, eggs, soot, flies,
and the wing-brush of skirts across stone floors.
Steven Cramer is the author of five poetry collections: Clangings (Sarabande Books, 2012), The Eye that Desires to Look Upward, The World Book, Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand, and Goodbye to the Orchard, which won the 2005 Sheila Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club, and was named a 2005 Honor Book in Poetry by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. A fifth collection, Clangings, will be published by Sarabande Books in 2012. He directs the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For more information, visit www.stevencramer.com. (updated 10/2013)