Plush Fire

1

I think it was in the Uffizi Gallery, in Florence, 
the restored painting of Andrea del Sarto—
it filled a whole wall—a royal Christ 
circled by courtiers, not a remarkable work till the original 
colors had been bared by scalpel and acid, 
the deep greens and reds of the velvet robes, 
the intense silence of the golds (the sound of a great bell no longer 
ringing), the souls both enveloped and expressed by the fabric, 
like a Joan of Arc within her plush fire. 
When I went out the doors into the humid 
city heat, dust clogging the engines of cars on the cobbled streets, 
dulling the vendors' trays of gold souvenirs 
on the footbridge over the Arno, and making bitter 
the tart gelato, the melon and tamarind ice at the corner bar, 
I knew that if you had been there, you would have been too guilty 
and excited to speak, the relic of red and gold 
secreted in your memory, a stash of rose light 
in the crack between your shoulder blades, 
as if you'd stolen a silk camisole from a boutique 
and couldn't wait to get back to our pensione 
to try it on in the long mirror: 
you'd want it all for yourself.