The Ghiberti Doors

—mira arte fabricatum

Coming on a door you turn the knobto let its musty secrets out to air,but here you stand amazed at a bronze pairsuspended in the Tuscan sunlight. You touch

and talk of them as if old doors were suchunmoving things an architect could declarethey are but fragments of a building wherea wall opens or a corner gathers dust.

Doors' discoveries can be sensational—perhaps a royal adulteress caught unaware,a boy's face pressed to her black hair,watched by a maid who has a master key.

Here the font by holy alchemyopens into four concentric sphereswhile underneath the gilt entablatureart hangs mutely like an occasional

verse inscribed on a small child's silver cup;Venus floats forgotten on the sacred air,and the love you dreamed of, like Augustine's pear,is taken, tasted, and made up.

II

Imagine the gilt pure gold, liars like Jacobleaning out for air, the obedient houndsquick for the hunt, no man caring which brother robsor what the women think who fill the background;          down front, showing the motion of her mind,          Eve right-hands God for the body of mankind.

Tote up the civil gains from then to now,add alphabets and ships, calculatethe shape of space, the distance to the moon,the circumference of law, the annual rate          deserts die and land turns into sea;          bless the remaining days of earth's orange eye.

As a bookkeeper rubs out wrong figures, for the noncethe scholars of Florence have scoured time's defacementof saints' miraculous hopes and people's impatiencethat like dirt from the hands of history had overladen          Moses in Egypt, the shimmering kingdom of David,          Solomon's justice, and cost Samson his head.

These little men and women in shining bronzecarry on their lives as if there were no end,blind Isaac pretends to see, and God with a beardstands tall like a working man. His story bends          around the earth like light around the sun,          splitting the air and blacking the space it burns.