After Fra Angelico
(Fra Angelico - Annunciation, c.1430, Cortona)
In the top left corner of this Annunciation
there's inset an Expulsion from Eden.
Here, we are meant to infer, the story begins.
The androgynous angel - oddly, a ringer
for Adam - is visibly sad it has come to this:
even if the long sword prodding the miscreant's back
will brook no nonsense, a tender hand on his shoulder
seems extended to reassure as much as to push.
Adam's still stunned by what he has done.
On his arm a toy hoe pre-empts our guess:
he has no idea what a life of toil might mean.
His white hairless legs and delicate fingers
show how unsuited he'll be (his own dawning thought)
to pulling up tares.
Eve too is pretty upset - it's not every day after all
one's expelled from bliss -
but already her eyes have that hint of 'making the best':
it will, we imagine, be she who takes things in hand.
Many years on we might hear her calling to Cain
to stop bitching at Abel in the yard.
She'll remind him how lucky they are:
they have learned where the country lifts and sinks
with the seasons' moods, they have biddable land
and amenable beasts..
Also (she may not add) the sex has improved
since her feller put on muscle and got a nice tan.
The better half of him, now, her own creation, she thinks:
Adam, for good or ill, The First Man.
PM
Annunciation with Possum and Tomatoes
(Dieric Bouts - Annunciation, c.1450, Getty Centre, LA)
Faith, in spring, is a fertile bed, the hope of things
unseen: summer, round in the hand; toil, expectancy, ripe
weight. Grace, for a possum, is another thing:
a sleeping dog, an open gate, nine soft globes,
each bite, a new beginning. She ate them all,
but afterward I dreamed I saw a jungle of tomatoes
grown wild against the house, the fruit hanging fat, allegorical,
as the red canopy in Dieric Bouts's Annunciation,
in which the Virgin, surprised in her bedchamber,
looks up from her book as the Flemish angel, plain
and reliable as a school nurse, calmly delivers the news.
His right finger points up at the Father,
or at the tomato-shaped folds of the drapery, as he explains
about the fruit of the womb, how it will ripen and spill
to repair the blight in the garden, the one that begot Death
and Beauty in turn, having first made thieves of us all.
Bouts's Holland would not taste tomatoes for another century.
The plague was swallowing citizens left and right,
but the good people of Haarlem, still donned their peasant
leggings and took to the field. Perhaps the ploughman,
framed moments ago in the gothic arch of the Virgin's
window, has set down his rake and is resting in the shade
of a tree, thinking about the fall and its hungers, and about himself,
kin to all mortal creatures, the ones who sow and the ones
who plunder after them, who wake famished in the night,
all furred appetite, dreaming of a fruit they have never known,
flesh and seed, crotch and vine, its taste in the mouth, sharp
as the known world, delectable as Eden.
Jennifer Maier
Four Darks in Red
(Mark Rothko - Four darks in red, 1958,
Whitney Museum of American Art, NY)
I cannot see a sentence of forgiveness through
this window red with blindness, or the seeking
of it. There are chords which lead to nothing we know
from an easement of music we must lean into
or resist, which we must have followed from its first quaver
in the fear of silence. Yet it will soon be gone,
a long thought quivering in the faint brush of crocus
arming the spring, and the salt wastes of our eyes
have never seen such splendour, never such regard
for the absolute, as when this window shatters in the high sun, and the day
soars up in a mood of brass from the lank prose of the hills.
Ever afterward there would be
a freedom, a simple admission that where the brush last lay
over the primer and the cotton duck canvas rolled like the law
in the darkness beyond the light of the pictures, estimation
seeded itself in the heart. It is only the feeling of red,
green, the blues of washed tile and skies hung to dry
over the parched fields of rape and flax, only that which finds
the surface. It cannot be opened, it must not be. So
for every entrance there is a latch of colour, in each
archway and threshold a place to rest the hand when stepping through
for balance, or it might be surety, a hand-hold to stave away
the beating pleasure of these colours. The world is not safe.
Lighthouses once assured the coasts, the beams like bows
sul ponticello on night strings, but no more. Now
the sea skulks under the bows, the rude littorals
state their places, we move away from the shore.
Briefly we are startled by the wind bearing its salt.
Hearing the fine hum of tides in the enclosed fields
we lurch in the gut, in the straits of thought nearly
founder, looking at these fields rendering the summer
or the weak tin of winter cloud high up, the autumn's
blundering rust, spring's thin drab mist at first
come to grief. Evening hacks at the veins of the day.
You undid the laces of your life. You lay down.
Crispin Elsted