Bruce Beasley
The Vanishing Point
The painting has vanished. The icon remains.
—Robert Payne, on
Leonardo’s Last Supper
To lessen the impact of the blanks,
a beige watercolor now covers the gaps
where Leonardo’s pigment’s
unsalvageable,
though for twenty years the restorers have scraped
through centuries of grime
& the refectory’s
kitchen-grease,
through the retouched
retouchings, strata of varnish & glue,
as though back down
to the sacral,
the original
turquoise & lapis, the lost
fingerbowls & Judas-
spilled salt—
as though down to the last
supper itself, the first
liturgy of blood & flesh, so mingled
with betrayal
(the decayed restorations
of Judas
flaking away)
what restorer’s scalpel can scrape them apart?
*
Napoleon’s bored cavalry
scratched out the apostles’ eyes,
& steaming dung from their horses
left white streaks of mold down the fresco.
& the monks hacked away Christ’s feet
for a more commodious kitchen door,
& an American bomb
crushed the ceiling & apse
all around the sandbagged
Supper, left it
exposed to two years of rains.
& now tourists of the restoration
must walk
through a labyrinth
of glass chambers
with wind-machines & antibacterial carpet
to purify their dust
& bioeffluents
(sweat, dandruff, car exhaust, boot-dirt), to
slow
the inexorable encroachment of the blanks.
*
Christ, at the vanishing point. He’s caught
exactly in the cracked
spine of the book where I try to stare down
the chipped image I remember
through scaffolding in Milan. Green
mold over His fingers
as they reach for the bread of His life.
In a half-ripped seam
where the binding’s unraveling:
blue robes toward the loaf & the light,
red for Passion toward the wine & the dark, Judas
shoved back from Him as though by a blast.
*
If I have been unable to do,
Leonardo wrote in his notebook, under
“Epitaph”: if I . . .
& there the sentence
trails away, unfinished
as whatever it was he meant his life to do . . .
*
“a surface completely ruined,
disintegrating into tiny scales of color
falling off the wall.
It’s enough to make a person
want to shoot herself”
—the restorer
Vasari, 1556: the Last Supper is already only a
muddle of blots.
“This is not Leonardo. It is merely
fragments of bottom layers of the underlying original”
—critic of the restoration
Lord, is it I?
floodwater under the painting
two feet high
La pittura é rovinata
tutta
“The question is whether to attempt to recover an original
that is at best in a fragmentary state”
If I have been
unable to do, if I . . .
Drink ye, all of it, for this is my blood
*
Zachary, at the vanishing point. T-
lineage acute lymphoblastic
leukemia. At eight,
Pokémon in his hand,
his face a muddle of blots, sourceless
bruises. Feed-
tube through his nose. Ativan
hallucinations. Prednisone
tablets tucked into Jell-o.
Methadone-
wean,
after two months on morphine.
The chemo’s
got to get in there & blast
all those mean cells away. It’s
supposed to make you sick, that means
you’re mowing down all the bad guys inside you
Verily
the traitor’s hand
dips with me, into this dish . . .
*
The underlying
original inside
me, sfumato,
in its smoke-haze of squamous flakes:
if I leach
down to it, with solvents
under microscopes, scalpel-scrub
of disintegrated grime & lacquer, down
to the gesso’s
fundament, to
the “grotesquely feminine”
lips of Christ? What’s left
if the accretions,
layer by layer, fall away, & the glazed
opacity of the first pigment,
fungus-overgrown, betrayal-mingled, crumbles
off the wall?
*
—Dream-stare
into the alabaster masks, no
eye-holes, of the Customs guards,
on the border
of Georgia,
on Zachary’s hospital grounds:
& the guard
whose hair is blowing
away, in clumps,
confiding
It’s supposed to feel
miserable, like this.
That’s how you can tell
it’s made
good . . .
*
Among the possible
modes of failure,
post-remission:
mediastinal mass, recurrence
of blast-cells in the marrow—
Then the requisite
irradiation of the brain
& spinal column where the leukemia’s
occulted—
(“a more toxic approach
may increase the likelihood of a cure”)
Sacrament
demanding blood, & flesh—
*
Re-
touch, Christ, that dipped
sop, that knife-blade in Peter’s fist. Pass
over (lamb’s
blood on every door)
& over the molting
color-scales. Pass
over Zachary, in his sleep:
bruise by bruise
wipe clean.
The picture
is utterly ruined
That thou doest, do quickly:
Scour, acid-
burn, down
to the point
of the disease’s
vanishing
*
lying
original
smoke-haze:
if I leach
solvent
disintegrated
fundament
“grotesquely feminine”
left
opacity first
betrayal
—Dream-stare
*
When the workmen’s
pick-axes loosened whole crusts
of paint, the monks
nailed them back on, so Doubting
Thomas’ finger points
now to that hammer-healed
paint-wound
The irrecoverable whole
—A line
of poetry is a chance,
said Hugo Ball,
to get rid of all the filth
that clings to language
—& that crumbles
everything in the cleaning
so that the point,
whatever it once
was, vanishes,
like the rice-grains
of Leonardo’s lapis, under
microscrope, scraped
down & reaffixed
so you can barely tell
what grime’s
expunged along the fracture-
lines, what
incrustations
of overlaid varnish & inbred
soot must be suffered
to remain
*
At the point
of origin, also the vanishing:
through www.newprayer.com
a radio transmitter
will set loose your supplication
at the site of the Big Bang
(“why not send our prayers directly
to the last known
location of God?”)
& hound
down the gone
One
(prepaid account for 20 prayers, $75)
—The diagrammed
perspective lines
toward the vanishing point
at Christ’s head: like an assassin’s
rifle-sight
Signal-scatter, into the cosmic
background radiation
To transmit
your prayer
to the Big Bang now, click here
*
In the paint’s
caesura, the beige
gaps, where any
conclusion whatsoever
may be drawn
what Christ-face
undiscovered underneath
stares & crumbles, waits
still for the traitor’s lifted hand?
waits
for the oncologist’s lifted hand—
*
Mow down,
Christ, the bad
inside:
amateur-flaws in the overpainting, restoration-
lies
originations obscured in
smoke-haze
if I leech
off You, solve,
salve
me
Reintegrate from the
fundament De
profundis
*
Should the Supper
(sandbagged, or scaffolded, or trapped
at the glass labyrinth’s
core)
be forced to last?
Or allowed
its vanishing,
its last-known
location
somewhere among the irradiated
blanks? Set
loose my supplication,
while Zachary’s blast cell
count is down
to nothing,
to hammer-healed
Christ,
at the vanishing point, the click,
O-
mega,
the last
Unknowable (restored
to disintegration),
irrecoverable
original,
the last-known . . .
for my nephew Zachary
From The Corpse Flower: New and Selected Poems (University of Washington Press, 2006)