Sample Poems by George Drew

Condivi

I spent last night with Michelangelo,
mostly in his shop with blocks
of marble at our feet, some works
by others interspersed among cartoons,
and boards with drawings of heroic scope
propped up in every available space.

We talked, or rather he talked,
into the early morning hours
about the finer points of the Sistine
even His Holiness had missed
in his nocturnal perambulations
on the scaffolding to check the work
of this Florentine he’d made to do
God’s work as God (and Julius) wished.
 
He elaborated with a small boy’s glee
the common sources of the enterprise
so cunningly concealed by epic sweep:
 
God’s reaching out of nothing, nothing
more than a remake of cloud formations
seen while working the Carrara pits;
the dark creating light conceived of
as fish funneling through high waves;
the graduated size of figures as
the eye rewarded its discovered skill,
its strength, its Sistine-sized acuity.

Only once did we venture out of doors
to take the air like bantam Samson’s
among the corridors of stone
that flanked the road on either side,
and witness on the river’s calm
the milking of the yellow moon
hanging like Delilah’s nipple just
above the red bucket of Samson’s mouth.

And only once did he stop talking,
as we stood before a bush burning
in the luminescence of moonlight
like the tablature of what he said
he’d dreamed: his marble-plated birth,
God’s chest heaving him out of itself
as lonely as the hangman that
the first outcasts encountered
on the strength of one wrong whim.

And then, as we stood in the road,
this Daniel of the architects of beauty,
saying stone ought not to come
between two such as we,
pulled me close and touched my eyes.

With that it was a soft goodnight,
and off I went—me, Condivi—
to turn staffs into serpents as dazzling
as the statues glowing in moonlight,
ready and willing, pray God, to really
puncture stone for the first time,
to unlock the image from within.

Lorenzo’s Dream

There was a bird with eye and wing
of eagle, and neck of swan.
And in its talons were the legs,
swung wide, of a nude boy, or god,
his hair blond ringlets and his head
thrown back, mouth parted, sight
turned inward, body bending, bird
curved like a shore, vast seas of air.

I knew his talent was sublime,
but who was it being carried off?
Who carrying? I was not sure.
But I am that I will not be denied.
Let us say that the naked boy,
who signifies unprotected gifts,
has for his overseer the bird,
protector of its master’s interests.

So in a fortnight Michelangelo
will come to live with me at court.
To you, the father of this prodigy,
I give my pledge that he shall sit
beside me, put above even my own
and all others of true bloodline.
And for you a job—your choice.

It is done. Oh, and Buonarroti,
remember: be diligent, not poor.

Pico

Letter, 1490

  My Dear----------,
This young boy I have told
you of is everything I’m not: unlearned,
insensitive of speech, inquisitive of nothing
but a chisel plying stone, perhaps some paint,
and even in his stature blunt, ill-formed,
with black hair, eyes not quite defined in hue,
and teeth like the unfinished lumps of stone
he hammers at with the abandon of the damned.
As is my wont, normally I wouldn’t bat an eye
in his direction. But Lorenzo praises him.
And where Lorenzo looks is value, rest assured.
So I looked, too. And here is what I found:
a sibyl in the manner of the ancients carved
from marble he had gotten, so I’m told,
from masons in the garden, begging them
with charm no one, not even I, would guess
exists beneath that rough exterior of his.
There’s diamond there, in need of only
the sure jeweler’s hand of Time
to shape it to a gem fit for a Medici,
or even—and I don’t exaggerate—a pope.
Trust me: this young boy’s going to be a god
creating gods. The spark he carries in
his fingertips bespeaks a greater fire within.
And like Prometheus he’ll serve and master it
at once, both Beauty’s henchman and her king.
I almost pity him the torment he will know.