Its Ghostly Workshop: Poems

The Caravaggio Room

23 The Caravaggio Room “Yuck,” you heave before that sick boy with the gray face. “Bacchus, my ass,” you say. “Caravaggio’s,” I say. And so you smile, grimly. And, larger, floating in blacker, emptier spaces, the head of Goliath, his adolescent killer delicately disgusted by what we know, what they knew who paid for it, is the artist’s own likeness. Ah! here’s the huge Madonna dei Palafrenieri where the Virgin has her bare foot on a serpent’s neck, leaning, looking, demonstrating a mildly unpleasant task. And below his slung and guiding spearpoint penis is the child’s foot on her foot, taking instruction, learning young, the writhing snake already calligraphy of defeat. “Oh, look,” you say, “golden wires!”—such thin halos round the women’s heads, the Virgin’s and her mother’s, perfunctory, paid for, we guess—but none, nothing remotely divine to mark the mortally naked boy. Along the farther wall St. Jerome, an old man working, stylus in hand, eyes close to the page, and next the Baptist’s unmuscled body in its languorous lounging, body of a catamite, candid eyes aimed right at you—I mean at Caravaggio. This John’s positioned directly across the room from the sickening boy. 24 And suddenly we see between them, in the room’s cube of air, that some curatorial wit has placed in our space a frolicking imperial Satyr, intact except for his token of membership in the honest world of paganism. Let’s get the hell out of here. I need a Negroni and a long, slow taste of your salty flesh. ...