The Vocative Case

Not everyone agrees
on which man
of the seven

in the painting
called The Calling
of Saint Matthew

is Matthew.
Who’s doing
the calling is open

and shut: white stripe
distinguishing
the head, weird

shimmer on the crag
of bone under
the eye. A wrist

raised in quotation
of the first man
meeting God.

To rip whose
life to ribbons?
Revolution,

love’s severe
recruitment
find us equally

unready.
A moment
before, they had

been counting
coins, believers
in the world of questions

able to be solved.
Light draws
us to the one

who thinks he’s been
selected, singled
out, whose self-

directed index may
also be pointing
left in disbelief: who,

him? A burning
cheek, set
jaw, one eye

darkened by
fear is all there is
of the face

we’re last to see.
Bent deeper than
the rest, holding

with both
hands to his last
certainties.

 

---

 

Campo dei Fiori

Around the feet
of the man stripped
and set on fire for thinking

differently, disposable-
gloved
fingers undress

artichokes
with knives.
The smell of frying

skin rose
in this square.
Naked to the secrets

of their hearts,
they convalesce
in acid pools.

It’s bad for you to picture
many suns,
to say the universe is nothing

like an onion.
Uncarapaced, no longer
sovereign

globes, they are reduced
to something better:
to be like and among

unique, uniquely
wounded others.

 

---

 

Envoy

After the century, he drags
a line through questions, notes

to self about a prophet known
for nothing, for his trick of turning

nothing into bread.

I still don’t believe
I don’t believe it is

He is spotted in the field mechanically
giving his coat away, like a memory

error where the memory is right
but not the source.

his own messenger from
insults and injuries

Some mysteries leave him cold —

what he is
without his changes, where

God ends.

His soul’s career
to fill the almond shape

between your sphere
and his: the word attention,

song, the origin of grace

in the fierce yearning of an animal
for the straw-filled skin of its young.

For preferring life
translated, he is declared dead

by his father, swallows a fly
to show a man is defiled

only by what comes out of him.

right for an all
mighty sovereign to let

Each of his pleasures is a sign.

Home, the soft technology
of vowels in the mouth.

He may as well remarry.
Come

the war, he is a scholar
minus his library

who becomes doubt.

How can we
weak mortals

Images uncount
themselves.

Some decades are ellipses.
He still thinks of his mother

giving birth
and dying as a test.

In boyhood, he is made
to stand on tiptoe

to set type.