(Uccello’s “Battaglia di San Romano”)
I: AFTER UCCELLO
I have fought that battle in heraldic panels
Bitten in leathers, in Uccello’s image,
Under the poising and the levelling lances,
Crossing the visors and trumpets.
I have seen,
In a hedgehog’s vigil, ceremonious slaughter:
Halberd on battle-mace, cross-bows tight on their jesses
With a hawk’s extension, the rider’s face
Bowed to his horse’s mane under favors and feathers,
His profile naked to hazard in a locust’s weight of armor.
What the fighting portended,
Or how, in a spoiled light, that leaden
Discomfiture darkened our spear-points, the guidons
Failed on their silks, and the drum-skin’s hoop grew tauter,
No one remembers.
The maps and the outriders
Gave us no notice. The champion,
Sighting his lance’s length in an umber perspective,
Awaited some sun-burst to blazon that burden of armor
And interpret the contest’s directive.
Nothing responded.
II: ANOTHER PART OF THE FIELD
An unsuitable landscape, surely:
commanded
And chosen at once; inhuman and intimate; fated,
Familiar: the light of apocalypse
Forced through the smoke of a burning-glass,
Bitumen and nimbus together.
In the distance,
The hearth-beds of millet in a harrowed and featureless
Valley, the brand of the husbandman’s furrow,
Rose vertical.
Pomegranates reddened
The leafage an eclipse’s corona—yet the season
Was iron: a furnace’s floor where no holocaust was,
And the time was Armageddon.
III: ENCOUNTER
The spur spins, the contender
Spins on the cinches’ wheel of his saddle.
He measures necessity
With a pike-staff’s haft, from his wishes’ circumference
To the center of violence.
Fatality flows
Down his pike-staff’s length
To the curve of his bannerol. He touches the barb
To his pulses, steadies The shaft on a corselet of nerves
and is ready.
While that antagonist
On the belled Arabian crop of his stallion,
In the swathe of his turban, his lance
On the pin of his elbow like the hub of a compass,
Forces mortality’s sweat-drop.
The spur spins, the contender
Spins on the dial of his saddle
and the contest begins.
IV: A READING OP ENTRAILS
When the omens were served, we withdrew
To a higher position.
We prepared for the reading of entrails.
We saw that the mottoes were struck
On a grave-keeper’s cradle-song: the champion’s
Shock on the champion, the decorum of armies,
The breaching of metal and adamant, breast-plate and barbican,
Were one to the sibyl.
The portent that orders all circumstance
Descends in a blood-bath, where legend is changed into chance.
Yet a legend was served.
Whatever the omens portended
Or the weapon sought to refine to its satisfaction-
The bow-men debouched in the appointed valley,
The paladin’s silks went up with the angry devices,
Emblem and ikon yellowed the embroidered borders,
Defender measured the field with the defended,
And all was ordered
As in a decoration by Uccello:
A foreground of horses:
turquoise and cinnamon shod
With a jeweler’s crescent; the straining albino,
His contemplative chessman’s head in his bridle’s
rosette Calm in the contact of riders:
a navy of javelins
On the overturned horses, in a carrousel’s
Splintered rotations:
the field of the wilderness cinder
Fixed in its fated relations like an armorer’s fable:
The House of the Rod and the Water-Bow, the Cresset, the Sheaf
and the Gryphon
The cinq foil thicket laced with a pollen of poppies
The dismounted anonymous god in the gold-leaf rubble
And circling him there, on the broken lunette of his shield,
Three hares and a greyhound pursuing
and the invisible thong of the
snare.
V: FESTIVAL OF ANGER
One, with a trident, in the ammoniac
Dung of the stable, waits for the bluefly’s epiphany; one
Turns from a burnish of water, the millenial
Barrow that honors a monster,
And enters a labyrinth; one, in a havoc of horses,
Harrows the world’s rage with his lance’s point
For a chapel, a chalice, the cannibal kiss of a brother.
Fighters in the blood, contenders
Antlered or garlanded, horned and necessitous ones-
Old changlings of the gorged heart of the toad
Who come by ways as desperate as this
To work in the breast-bone and whiten the cicatrice –
However we sham or subvert the indifferent disaster
Or give the ungratified godhead of the scourge
The service of the sedulous offender,
Your angers are festive!
Yours but to touch
The tinder to the tinder, the inexpressive
Desert adamant that hardens its venom
In the forge of the cactus
And has no thought of sacrilege or pardons,
Incense, oblations, or talismanic letters;
that breaks
The providential fountain from the stone
And looks like history or hope, but takes
A moment’s inadvertence for its own.
I would fight that battle after the battle,
Inward and naked, after the outward
Packs like a weaver’s spindle or poises like a picture
Baroque with the ceremonious violence of the shuttle,
The pencil, the burin, the matched and extortionate word-
The battle of the monster and the mothers
That no contender wages for a legend
At a charmed lake’s bottom;
where nothing moves but the im-
agining
Begetter and the habitual figures of his quarrel,
Who sees, beyond the landscape of surrender,
The pomegranates redden in a pomp of laurel,
The furrow blazing like a revelation,
And circling him there, still placeless and unimagined,
Three hares and a greyhound pursuing, and the invisible thong
of the snare.
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