True Descenders
[after Luca Signorelli's The Damned Cast into Hell (remembered from a high school text)]
No matter how thunderous the chorus
of their damnation, surely the wine-veined,
gold-tipped fornicators must relish
some pleasure in the last hurling spiral
down the spines of all the bat-winged devils.
Like the star-shaped sugar maple leaves
plummeting toward the thick asylum
of my own backyard, that warped infinity
of roots, it's impossible that their descent,
whether here or from the constellations
over Orvieto, could ever be anything
other than beautiful, their harshly bronzed
breasts and buttocks growing more luscious
with every imaginable sin. And what's
to be made of Saint Michael and his flock,
drawing their cloud-glazed swords,
torsos wrapped in steel? Especially now,
when the landscape's flustered, it's difficult
not to begrudge the high archangel
his stock of feather, his cosmic lock
of windblown hair, his breastplate, cool
to the touch. It's a point the leaves
don't have to argue, whether to give in
to the pull of a soon-to-be-iced
parch of autumnal earth, or to resist and so hang
perpetually rigid, heavy-legged traitors
to lust. Suppose our own innocence,
in that red November dusk at the end
of the world, should remain that righteous,
should take up its silver armor against
the quicker passions ready to tumble
in any celestial bed, we'd see how it is
that we've always lived in the house
of at least two Gods, one of nipples and random
erections, one of devotion to the virtuous
invisible, and that to truly worship either
is to finally love the other. If
the swollen, cartwheeling transgressors
of desire begin to desire once more,
who'd not let the blue-with-death demons
untie their hands and follow their
laughing down the hall? Who could
not feel their own body going holy?
Who would not take a lover then
and guiltlessly watch the wrist-ropes fall?
James Kimbrell The Gatehouse Heaven (1998)
The first person to e-mail me and tell what "Orvieto" is will recieve one point of extra credit. If this text is not currently assigned in class, you will get two points of extra credit.
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