after Rembrandt

Outside, the city suffocates, infected with death-carts,
_              __              _ash heaps in the yards, beds
_              __              __              _burned or dumped in the canals,
_              _some stained, some with imprints sunk in, like canvases,
_              __              _he thinks, the whole history of art
swept forward on the current of our loss. Contemplative,
_              __              _cold, his vision stepping out
_              __              __              _to the balcony again, Rembrandt sees
_              _nothing that he needs, so retreats back
_              __              _into the castle of his inwardness. If the soul,

he thinks, is a stone dropped in the center of the face,
_              __              _the face sealed back over it, but wavering,
_              __              __              _changed, then this morning he must paint
_              _more distantly, self-love abolished to the province
_              __              _of the weak, the mirror turned away from him,
the canvas laid out on a stretching board, the brush-tip
_              __              _revealing, beneath the splints of the initial lines,
_              __              __              _the eroding cliff-edge of his brow,
_              _the tumbles of hair almost statuary now, gray
_              __              _as chilled breath, each gesture unwrapping

the package of his face, the way he longs to unravel
_              __              _the loose bandages of age, so that for years now,
_              __              __              _watching himself aging in the paint,
_              _he’s felt the two ends of his life advancing toward
_              __              _each other with lances drawn, a confrontation
that ends, always, with Saskia on the bed again, her body thinned
_              __              _to a field the horses of her illness ramble through,
_              __              __              _the smell of snake oil and vinegar
_              _in the room, the soiled sheets, her lungs shredded
_              __              _by that awful bloody cough that even now

seems to echo through the house. When she died,
_              __              _he could not see for days through the dusting
_              __              __              _of his grief, until he revived a painting
_              _he had made of her, humble, unadorned,
_              __              _and smothered her not in the sores that inhaled her
in her final days, but in a velvet skirt and furs,
_              __              _peacock feathers in her hat, her drowned light
_              __              __              _resurrected into pearls, as if death
_              _were an ascension into royalty, or as if to make a gem
_              __              _of her, something he could store in the jewelry box

of memory. Even now he needs just a glimpse
_              __              _of it before he turns away—the dust, light-struck,
_              __              __              _catching in his throat—to crush
_              _the whole scene into the eyes, or so he can place a lock
_              __              _of her in the middle of the canvas, rendered
in a penetrating, almost venomous light, a dab of death
_              __              _in the orpiment like the light from a keyhole,
_              __              __              _as if he might look into her dying as he paints,
_              _like a boy who kneels before a door, mischievous,
_              __              _full of wonder, until that other, colder self

drops the curtain of his face back over her again.