When Caravaggio’s Saint Thomas pokes his index finger
past the first knuckle, into the living flesh of the conscious
perfectly upright Jesus Christ, His bloodless wound
like a mouth that has opened slightly to receive it, the vaginal folds
of parting flesh close over the man’s finger as if to suck,
that moment after Christ, flickering compassion,
helps Thomas touch the wound, calmly guiding
the right hand of His apostle with His own immortal left,
into the warm cavity, body that died and returned to the world,
bloodless and clean, inured to the operation at hand
and not in any apparent pain—
to accidentally brush against His arm
would have been enough, but to enter the miraculous flesh,
casually, as if fishing around in one’s pocket for a coin—
because it’s in our natures to doubt,
I’d doubt what I was seeing, too.
Drawing closer, Thomas widens his eyes
as if to better absorb the injury, his three companions also
strain forward, I do, too,
and so would you, all our gazes straining toward
the exquisite right nipple so beautifully painted I ache to touch
or to kiss it, press my lips to the hairless chest of a god.
His long hippie auburn hair falls in loose
girlish corkscrew curls, the hairs of His sparse mustache
straggle over His upper lip, face so close that Thomas must surely
feel Christ’s breath ruffling his brow.
The lecturer closes his notebook and we exit the auditorium.
Conveyed smoothly on the moving sidewalk, as if on water,
but not water,
whooshed through the long, shimmery tunnel connecting
the east and west wings of the National Gallery,
my friend and I hurtle away from the past, that open wound,
and toward the future—
the dark winter colors saturating my eyes suddenly
blossom into the breezy pastels of Italy’s gelato,
milk sherbet quick-frozen and swirled
into narrow ribbons of cold rainbow
unbraided into separate chilled stainless steel tubs set
under glass in a cooler case:
tiramisu, zabaglione, zuppa inglese,
milky breasts whipped, rippled peach and mango, pistachio,
vanilla flecked with brown dizzying splinters of bean,
coffee, caramel, hazelnut, stracciatella,
raspberry, orange, chocolate, chocolate mint; silken peaked
nipple risen from the middle of the just barely opened
undisturbed tub of lemon so pale it’s almost white,
scraped with a plastic doll’s spoon;
scooped and deposited on the tongue,
then melting its soothing cooling balm.
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