Michelangelo's Seizure: Poems

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Michaelangelo's SEIZURE

University of Illinois Press

Chapter One

After Goya

Heat-struck, bleached, a sucked pit
rolling in the mouth of his fever, he lies there,
ready for the leech,

anxious, brave, his soul stamping
in the bull-ring of consciousness,
but fragile too, a blown-glass stomach,

the bones in his wrists like chalice
stems, the first leech soft upon his skin,


like a brush-tip,

like a tongue, the doctor probing,


trying to look inside, scooping
his arms around him from behind,

so that Goya dreams
he's a soldier

being dragged from the front,


the beautiful Spanish dust kicked up
into his eyes, the doctor dropping a lantern


into the sinkhole of his lungs, urging him
to cough the bullets of infection

out, though when Goya feels the rim
of the water-glass flush against his lips,

it's as if the reared-back horses change


to marble in his gaze, rifles
losing their erections,

bullets leaving only clothes-lines


in their paths, so that he's hiding


himself away again, smuggled in the basket

of laundry his mother carries


through the yard, wobbling, trying not



to let her see, the wind


fluttering the shirt-tail of his hair,
his body

turned now to equal parts tenderness



and rage, the crossed swords
of his ribcage being raised


even as the doctor prepares

to dunk him in the washing tub again,


using his forearm like a blindfold
to protect the eyes, though,

at once, Goya glimpses


his own face,



a watery self-portrait

that wrinkles through his mind-
which is how I saw him that morning,

more than a dozen years ago, strung between
my draining tubes as the machine churned

the blood out of me,

his face fleeting but complete,

flapping like the tail of a deer,
a streak of white that I followed

through the green forest light of a seizure.

Monet Going Blind

Work of the eyes is done, now
Go and do heart-work
On all the images imprisoned within

-RILKE

1. Remembering Camille

It's like the art of making a woman
blush from across
the room, that kind of looking-
hollowing, aggressive-
but internalized now, so that even
as he feels the light
glinting off the buttons of his coat,
as he hears the light
playing his buttons like a flute,
the avalanche
of his beard teased into a fine mist,
as if at any moment
he might begin to float, he can't help
but think that he is merely
old, the watery self flowing
always inward now. He holds
the brush, not like a baton
to the music of the shore,
not like a scalpel or a key,
not the way a mother holds
a spoon to the child's mouth,
but almost, yes, like an arrow
he's withdrawing, with experience
and love, from the chest
of a dying man, so as to let the wound
bleed out, the way,
years earlier, when he'd looked
deep enough, into churchstone,
or the impossibly intricate mind
of the haystack, he'd
slowly remove the injection of the gaze,
he'd begin to reel
the gaze in, so that the jeweled
secrets, the hard pitted light
at the quietness of objects, would leak
into the air, would haunt
the exterior-a membrane, a mirage.
It's blinding, he thought,
the pace with which the mind
converts light into more
than itself, that holy photosynthesis,
into field dust and mood,
into memory, the infinity of twigs,
linseed upon the grindstone,
bits of oil paint splattered in
the snow, like colored bird-droppings,
his wife once
joked. And when she lay
dying, the doctor saying his good-byes,
Monet, knowing he shouldn't,
stood before her, already mixing
the colors, a drip-cloth
unrolled across the carpet,
three-legged easel
locked in place. Awash in a torrent
of blankets, she lay
all night for him, a reluctant muse, drifting
through the insomnia
of lanterns, as he swayed at the edge
of her bed, almost fatherly,
but doing something
she couldn't quite name,
not quite a blessing or a spell,
but trying to lure
something out of her, something
she wanted, all at once,
desperately to keep, until there
was a sweetness
in the air, something she could
have sworn was a mist
of her perfume. At Giverny,
standing on the platform
he had made, with brush cup
and easel built in, pulleys
anchored to the bridge,
Monet remembers her
as he lowers himself
through the wind,
as he walks out everywhere
on the diminishing
tightrope of his sight. Her whole life,
he thinks, packed,
with the landscape, into memory's
foolish mothball light.
Below him, the lilies,
shifting and tethered,
appear as footprints across the water,
the tracks perception
leaves, though all motion
is exterior to them,
a display of current, of wind.
Once, with his second wife,
in Venice, a pigeon landed
on the tips of his fingers,
then disappeared into his sleeve.
A moment of panic,
the coat shucked off in flurry,
the pigeon loosed,
and his first wife floating towards
the ceiling again, as he stood
there shivering, the coat
lying rumpled at his feet.

2. Self-Portrait with Cataracts

It's appalling, the way the light escapes.
-MONET

Because art gives our own loss
back to us, camouflaged
as beauty, because the self,
distilled, echoes back
through harbor stone and lily,
through rose-arch
and wisteria, he paints, finally,
himself retreating
into the foxholes of his eyes,
his whole face smudged
beneath the cataract's gleam,
drowning in the broth light,
one eye covered completely
when he paints,
the other made planetary
in the atmospheric glass,
his monocle, gold-rimmed,
radiating scowl-lines
around the eye, so that when
he places the canvas
on the floor as if to look
upon a landscape,
he sees, among the white-tipped
reeds and the bridge
frowning across the wrinkles
of the face, two birds
where the eyes had been,
their feathers tucked in,
heads bowed, not moving at all,
though their feet paddle
desperately beneath. Hovering
like that-ethereal,
not a self, but a wave
curled up out of the self,
so its reflection is its source-he feels
a storm break inside
his face as a light mist rises
from the paint, the way,
years earlier, the ground floor
abandoned to the flood,
he stood, upstairs, watching torn
leaves smeared across
the water, violent and seductive,
like the trail of clothes
across a bedroom floor, although-
he remembers remembering
this-it was February, so that he
was watching, not leaves,
but the ruins of his own uprooted
garden, a flotilla
of marguerites and bellflower,
processional of blue
thistle, pink sumac, Alice,
behind him, shivering
in the bed, feverish, leukemia
passing through her,
poisonous as color through a leaf,
the hook of each breath
unstitching something inside,
as if she were becoming
the rattle in the shutters,
as if she were slowly turning
herself into the window
he was gazing through,
so that he knew, even then,
that he would never
not be looking through her,
each morning, in the mirror,
his face laid on top of her face.
When she died, he prayed,
one night, for whatever comes
to lean down over him
and pluck the flowers of his sight.
Going blind, he imagined,
was a way to feel her
leaving him again, as his first
wife had, his whole life now
like a fist loosening from
around the moment of his birth.
But the hand keeps
longing for the weight
of the amputated brush,
and his hand would unfurl
each stroke from the memory
of tendons, of light, as now,
leaning down
to darken out the eyes,
he remembers, at the window
again that night, seeing,
on the surface, like a tiny
lighthouse tumbled from
the shore, the lantern
he had hung one morning
in a tree, still lit, the severed
branch holding it up above
the waves. And how later,
when she grew silent, he held
a small mirror just above
her mouth, then swiped, almost
thoughtlessly, a finger
through the breath
he'd captured on the glass.

At the Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp

after Rembrandt

The split body is taboo, must not be looked
upon-not even by the doctor, vacant beneath
the charcoal of his hat, his hands working

on their own, one cleaving the muscles open
for the light, all sexed leaves and petal-swarm,
sheared away from the trellis of the bones,

the other hand mirroring the motions these muscles
would permit, which is where the students look,
trying to see the cadaver's reflection in the doctor's

skin, like Perseus capturing Medusa in his shield,
as if one glimpse of the dead man's soul might
turn their coppery faces into stone. Audacious,

self-adoring, a devil's tail of hair silking down
his back, Rembrandt will not be distracted,
not by the book-light texting the body, not

by the dumb-show of the doctor's hand,
not by the muscles in his own arm which constrict
and separate as he paints, preparing to flatten

the body, make it into color, shades of light,
perspective, what the soul might be if he could
capture it, like a moth trapped in an upturned glass,

the suffocating wing-flutter arrested on his brush,
though it's his own soul he unearths, of course,
the cadaver's skin turning slowly into the frozen,

winter-light of memory, the plagued and anemic
village of his childhood, all ice-floe and broken
arteries, a mud-horse breaking an ankle in the slush,

reared back, the death-cart toppled in its wake,
the dull-eyed, naked bodies spilling through the artist's
mind, the death-flies, the stench. Is this what I have

to wade through, he thinks, the sloppy intestines
of these streets, art like a rag pressed against
a gagging mouth, a way to hold the horror back?

It's almost paralyzing now, the stillness of the corpse's
face, the sprung bowels, the wet and marbled muscles
turned over in the light, then the sound of something tearing,

and a darkness revealed in him, death in the upturned
soil of the heart, venomous, swift, so terrifying
that it must be taken in with a shadow-glance and peak,

like a poison downed in sips, like the one scene
I can't quite imagine from my life, corpse-like beneath
the surgery lights, the doctors masked, slowly breaking

into me, like outlaws gathered around a safe, the tissue-spreaders,
the clamps, the dead man's kidney coiled
atop the surgeon's hand, already polluted, the infection

hidden, like a flame at the center of coal, a piece
of death lowered into me, though I can't see any of it
until I see it in Rembrandt's scene, the doctor,

in his witches' hat, one hand clamping the tendons,
his other training its shadow on the wall as the dead
man reaches through the puppet-sock of the doctor's

robes to take control, and Rembrandt, unblinking,
seemingly unchanged, works and waits for God's love
to come down, sharp and cruel as a spade which misses,

again, the swifter beast coiling back inside of him.

Renoir, Arthritic

He's up early, considering the body,
its wetness, the bladder
like a puffer fish, the bowels
swallowing and swallowing,
mucus, come, blood, the soft crab
of the heart, darkly breathing,
the lungs spread out in the chest
like wings of a manta-ray,
not to mention the rich coral
of brain, the whole body
a trapped sea, netted in the skin,
perception itself just the motion
of the waves, the boat-wake
of experience healing into memory,
so that lying there, waiting to ring
the tiny silver bell that brings the nurse,
he feels his arthritis like a drought
inside of him, knowing the curative waters
at Bourbonne are no good, no good
the medicinal drip, his hand bruised
this morning where the brush was
strapped to it, though perhaps a bit of cloth
might be used between his fingers
and the wood, so that he can
continue to paint, to become
his rose-filled models, to feel
the elasticity of them, their fluidity
even in the hard desert-turtle
of his hand, so that he can continue
staring through the three-pronged
compass of the easel, until he gives
the signal and the canvas is raised
before him, like a sail, and he begins
to work, leaning forward, squinting,
drifting towards the horizon that he makes.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Michaelangelo's SEIZURE by Steve Gehrke Copyright © 2007 by Steve Gehrke. Excerpted by permission.
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