Capponi Chapel, Santa Felicità, Florence         

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The caretaker won’t make change

for the machine that lights the paintings,

but the blues, pinks, and golds are

nearly bright enough to see in the dark: 

worker angels, women, the mother

swooning toward the only body to obey

gravitational law. Thirty-three years

before, no one did—on the adjacent wall,

Gabriel and Mary levitate with news.

When someone drops a coin

into the metal box, the sudden light

sets everything in motion: tempera 

spools of green and peach unwind 

the story left to right, right to left, 

and there, recessed, the red-haired painter, 

plainly clothed, looks upon the scene like us.

The caretaker steps outside to smoke.

I move more freely then around

the iron gate that keeps the tiny chapel

locked, strain my neck to view 

the ceiling’s dome, careful of the stones

I balance on. I visit not because I believe

but because I need to understand 

something about time. The mother

twice receives her child: from nothing,

nothingness: a bearing of the unbearable

all the way borne, past the unbecoming,

air dark with an imperceptible now.

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