Picturesque
By B.A. Van Sise
A real estate developer who only wants the land
stands with me in this Italian town, down in the dewy
valley where its winnowed and unwindowed church
lurches into the soil, broken by time but for one frescoed
wall. And now she’s trying to sell it all—the plaster
lasted centuries, and the faint paint upon it, too, with
the vague shape of martyred, hewn Saint Nicasio. He’s just past
his last hurrah: his head lopped off. Blame the Vandals-
The Vandals!—even by their name,
they must know they’re bad, but mostly
they just stand around to gab about
wine and women and song, a long
row of wild-eyed brutes. The Saint, instead, is
dead- a soft expression drapes his face, which has dropped
off his body, now. bound to anoint the ground at their
feet, meeting the dewy grass to last until now. Around it
there is no halo, no low proof. Yet it lasts in his
past: lingering up there where his head had been.
What becomes of the decapitated saints?
They rain upon Italy as drizzle on the leaves,
cleaved from their bodies to better
things, but not bringing their
corona with them. Do the haloes
ever catch up? Dress their fallen forms
with forever, bless their gray, lifeless faces
with the holy ghost? Most do not seem
to mind, find a soft place to wait and
rest, feel blessed as their cheek is washed
by warm blood.
No. The today the world leaves in their eyes
is just the today of satisfied Vandals, the
foreign past of a painter setting up at his easel
ready to draw, on wild life.
B.A. Van Sise is an author and photographic artist with three monographs: the visual poetry anthology Children of Grass with Mary-Louise Parker, Invited to Life with Mayim Bialik, and On the National Language with DeLanna Studi. He has won the Anthem Award, the Lascaux Prize for Nonfiction, the INDIES Book of the Year, and the Independent Book Publishers Awards gold medal, twice.
