After Bellini
Francis lifts his arms and the swallows
return to Capistrano, their brown heads
nodding haloes of feathery song.
He is standing outside himself
in an Italian version of ekstasis,
the bloody eyes of the stigmata
winking from his feet and callused palms.
Seeing him there, like a canticle of the sun,
who can tell the Inquisition is preparing
its medieval fresco, smoothing its wet-lime
plaster walls, grinding up its artists’
bones into the pigments from which Bosch’s
“Garden of Earthly Delights” will be born.
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