THE JEWEL OF THE WORLD

1.

Lion and unicorn, with as sure

a sense of theater as saints

in paintings who flank Mary’s throne,

or as circus animals

on hind legs—one paw wrapped around

a flagpole while another lifts

the curtain of a curious tent

paisleyed with golden, swimming tears—

open the magnificent

tapestry of a landscape rising

impossibly backstage in red:

a floral vertigo that rabbits

munch on in mid-air, while goats

and dogs and spread-winged falcons float

above the perennial thought of green.

Four trees planted in the ocean-

blue of the Lady’s island spring

up like four seasons all at once

and forever. Flowering orange and oak,

holly and pine: each of them,

like her, is in its prime.

Set like a jewel in the oval

ring of her island, fabulous

in her studded headdress

(in the fashion of the day,

one stuff lock of braided hair

shoots up like a horn), the Lady

holds, in a kind of winding-sheet,

a necklace to be buried in

the casket in her servant’s hands.

Gone is the life of senses she

had always kept in fine control;

she casts it off to save her soul.

But like a miniature of the trunk

a magician asks his volunteer

to enter so she may be sawn

in half, the jewel box leaves open

questions of renunciation.

Who could give away the world

undivided? Or at least

this one, a blooming hyperbole

of earthly beauty? A MON SEUL

DESIR, the legend reads above

her tent, which only makes it clear

that the desire to want no more

has always been too much to want.

We’ve kept this jewel of tapestry—

and swear she puts the necklace on.

2.

Step out from the Cluny and cross the Seine.

The bells are floating at Notre Dame, where sun

throws patterns from the scaffolding and swims

blind into the windows where it can.

The perpetual rose grows dirty and is cleaned

But never sheds a petal.

Nor, when you walk west along the quai,

watching the river splinter into stains

of painful brilliance, on to where the joined

pyramid of glass above the Louvre

flashes its hand, a diamond marrying

buried years to this one, will you find

a single way to turn your face from life—

nowhere in the museum’s honeycomb

of centuries. There, within one niche

eternity gives to Titian, his La mise

en tombeau is lowering the priceless

body into its unseen vault again:

Jesus Christ, King of the Jews, the jewel

of the world. Held still by his ring

of mourners in a winding-sheet, his weight

is nearly more than anyone can bear.

Heaven and Earth. Son of God in eclipse,

head and torso blocked off by the shadow

cast by an enigma: Nicodemus,

Joseph of Arimathea, John the Baptist

half-seem to be lifting him into the light.

Going or coming? Mary Magdalene knows

nothing yet, as she turns the Virgin away,

of visions meant for her on the third day—

the stone gone from the sepulchre, the angels

waiting at head and foot, the man she weeps for

unrecognized until he speaks her name.

The story hangs from his suspended frame

only because we know it; have seen him rise

in other galleries, stepping from each tomb

as if from a refreshing bath.

Prolific Titian lovingly stroked more

farewells like these in light and shadow,

Christ’s head at the right, then at the left;

one ends up at the Louvre, two at the Prado,

the world abloom with entombments.

3.

In Venice, sinking imperceptibly

each morning as the sun climbs from a sea

whose iridescence flakes into mosaics,

Titian has risen once again and turns

to his final canvas, the massive Pieta

meant for an altarpiece near his own grave.

Fierce Mary Magdalene, having cast off

her sinner’s finery—even the jeweled tones

borrowed from Bellini—runs in, a smear

of army green descending from the left,

arm raised in grief, half as if she’d wave

us in and half away. What’s to be done,

while the Virgin cradles uselessly the grown

son in her lap, but kneel to her and pray

(as does half-naked, ragged St. Jerome

or Job or Nicodemus or perhaps

Joseph of Arimathea—an old man,

in any case, identified as Titian)

and stare into the face of all our losses?

The master drops his brush, paints with bare hands.

Pearl of the late style, the head of Jesus

reclines into the lustrous oyster shell

of the temple apse, colder than the deepest

place in the ocean, a face so radiantly

cold, so terrifying, even Mary

holds him at a distance.

Titian also has a favorite son.

He has propped a votive panel—a little painting

within a painting, of Orazio

praying with his father—against one

of the pedestals with lions’ faces raising

Moses and the Hellespontic sybil,

two prophets, to the level of the saints,

and under the cross-bearing sibyl’s robes

has placed, horrifically, what even he

can’t wholly comprehend: a severed hand.

Suspend your disbelief. It is the hand

passed on to Palma, who’ll finish the Pieta

after Titian and his son fall to the plague.

Palma lifts his brush much like a needle

saving a dropped stitch, so that each thread

in the tapestry of loss is duly numbered,

much as the Lord counts hairs on every head

before he claims us, much as the attorney

catalogues, when thieves ransack the house

after Titian’s death, what now exists

elsewhere: they took away, he writes, “things

of gold, silver and gems,

and innumerable paintings of great value.”