Daniel Tobin
Giordano Bruno in Flames
(Burned at the stake, February 17, 1600)
A breeze's aftermath of sizzled flesh
licked the strafed cobbles of Campo di Fiori,
bore on its serpent's back winding through brush
the last whiff of Bruno, heretical meat.
Four centuries have burned, each one a wick,
consuming its essence like kerosene
since your screams—you must have screamed—erupted,
and the Roman dogs picked over your bones.
Born in the foothills of Vesuvius
with the ouroboros beside your crib,
you died having swallowed the universe
in your mind's feast of talismans and ciphers.
Old necromancer, numerologist,
for whom the One behind the multitude
throbbed like a wound, there is no ecstasy
like the world-lust of those who murdered you.
Figures, hieroglyphs, principalities.
The body an aggregate released at death,
launched to "innumerable living worlds."
And always at the center the Sun in stealth
dissembling in emblems, simulacra,
as though the code in each leaf were the name
of the world entire, Botticelli's Primavera
unlocked from the stone mortar's mash of green.
They mocked you before they lit the fire,
"Italian juggler," though you saw the atom
in the galaxy, and in their stares
your own charred finger pointing toward heaven.
But you were neither magus, nor prophet
of this boon-dock earth, displaced yourself: a door
through which we entered the newest orbit
between our desire and our solitude.
On this late winter morning's solstice
I walk among my yard's reluctant beds—
last fall's waste of leaves, mulch and crocuses,
the sun a white-hot rod boring through lead,
burning its blank seal into the given
that I would learn to read, had I the art.
O res ipse, magnum miraculum.
There is no center and love is at the heart.