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Prologue They darken. In the sky over Florence,
the oblong clouds swell and darken.
And hailstones
lift back through the updrafts,
thickening, darkening, until, swollen as bird eggs
they drop to the cobbled
streets.
Horses! the child Galileo thinks, then
peeks through the doorway
to the shock of ten
thousand icy hooves.
At his back, his father is tuning violins,
and because there is nothing sharper at
hand
Galileo saws through a captured hailstone
with a length of E-string,
the white globe opening slowly,
and the pattern inside
already bleeding its frail borders.
Layers and layers of ice—
Like
what? Onion pulp? Cypress rings?
If only the room were colder, and the eye
finer. If only the
hand were faster,
and the blade sharper, and firmer,
and without a hint of song…
Gregor
Mendel
and the Calico Caps
With tweezers light as a pigeon’s beak.
I have
clipped from each stamen a pollen-filled anther:
hour by hour, three hundred tiny heads, dropped
in my
robe’s deep pocket, their yellow snuff
sealing the seam lines. And thus,
I emasculate peas that
would sire themselves.
Heresy, some say,
to peel back the petal, sever the anther, stroke
to
the open blossom—with the sweep of a pollen-tipped
paintbrush—another blossom’s heritage.
Heresy,
to mingle seed
fixed in the swirl of the world’s first week.
Rest, now.
The bird-beak
tweezers mute on my lap.
In France, where orchids yield to unswept Alps,
they have tied to the legs of pigeons
parchment memoranda—silk threads
encircling the flaccid skin, and the burl of worlds
that lifts
between neighboring rooftops.
Twofold, I believe,
the gift of those gilded wings:
for the mind, script,
for the soul, the sluiced shape of the thermals,
at last made visible to the upturned eye…
My
fingers are weary. Snuff in the seam lines.
To ward off the breeze and the bee,
I have tied to each blossom
a calico cap. Three hundred
calico caps. From afar in this late-day light,
they nod like parishioners
in an open field,
murmuring, stumbling slightly through the green expanse,
as I, in my labors, am stumbling.
And all of them
spaced, it appears, on the widening arc
of some grand design. Blossom and cap in some
grand
design. Vessel and motion and the tinted threads.
Heresy? Have I not been placed on that widening path?
Am I not, in my calling, among them?
Epilogue:
Tulips, Some Said
When Abraham Ortelius fell in love with the world,
sometime in the Autumn of 1560, and vowed to map
its
grand expanse, its seas and serrated coastlines,
that the mind might hold, as it does an onion,
“the
weighty, layered wholeness of it,”
a tulip was launched, from Constantinople’s limpid port
toward the
deep-water docks of Antwerp.
Still tucked in its fleshy bulb, it rode
with a dozen others, rising and falling
near the textile crates, as the ship slowly crossed
the southern sun, past Athens and Napoli, Elba, Marseille.
This
is the world, Ortelius said, holding up to a friend,
Pieter Bruegel, a flattened, parchment, two-lobed heart.
And
this, Bruegel, paint still damp
on his landscape of games, each with its broad-backed child.
It was an autumn of
chatter and doubt, wonder
and grief and a quick indignation, sharp as linseed.
Slowly the ship tracked the Spanish
coast, rising
and falling as the rains began, and the olives darkened
and red-tunicked soldiers, increasing their
numbers,
rode north toward Flanders. When the bulb
of as tulip is parted—its casing is also a tunic—
it reveals to the eye the whole of itself, all it will need,
like a zygote cell, to enter its own completion:
roots
and pulp and, deep at the center,
leaves and a coil of bud.
That is the world, said Pieter. And that, said
Abraham,
each beholding the other’s expanse: on a single plane,
the oblong, passive hemispheres and, as if
caught
by a closer eye, stocky broad-backed, hive-strewn shapes,
alit in their grave felicity.
Mistaken for
an onion, the bulb roasted
near the Antwerp docks, then eaten with oil and vinegar.
Still new to the region, the
others were buried in soil.
In Abraham’s early folios, South America blooms
from its western shore,
articulating a shape
that has yet to appear, while in Bruegel’s painting,
a child on a hobbyhorse
whips a flank of air.
Neither man lived to see, in 1650, at Nuremberg’s
peace Fair and Jamboree, fifteen hundred
boys
on their wooden horses, fifteen hundred beribboned manes.
Watched from the highest balconies, they
filled the square
like tulips, some said. Like soldiers, said others.
Although none could be seen
completely. At last, all agreed,
they gave to the square a muted, ghostly atmosphere,
like the moods in medieval
tapestries
that hold in quiet violence and a trellised rose—
although the sun that day was bright,
all agreed,
and the wind splendid and clear, as it carried
the taps of those wooden hooves, and lifted
the ribbons this way and that, this way and that,
until night, like the earth, covered them.
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