For the Blind Man in the Basilica di Santa Croce, Florence by Jeffrey Thomson

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend September 25, 2015   For the Blind Man in the Basilica di Santa Croce, Florence   Jeffrey Thomson

Our stories can only carry us so far. I know there are layers beneath the layers and you haven’t asked but I would describe a fresco not even finished in the workshop, discovered beneath damaged plaster here in the Scuola del Cuoio. A simple Madonna and child marked off with a draftsman’s patience, a sketch of faces each etched with a different kind of cross. Evidence of a man working out art’s proportions like a map in the sand: golden mean in the plaster and articulation balanced between the bridge in the distance for scale and the sketched-in step-child abandoned almost in the foreground, clutching at the mother’s skirts—all the necessary work that gets covered over in the finish, smoothed out and blessed with plaster and color, that blinding light cast by the angelic child, mother adoring.   I would describe it all—but that’s easy and I am not so foolish anymore. I know you don’t need me to tell you this. You know the chittering of swallows as they fill the courtyard of the cloister and the weight of sunlight on cypress and stone. If meaning is made of anything you will have heard it in the sound of great space that flows down the stairs of the Pazzi chapel, in the rattle of the tourist dragging his bag on the pavers as he moves toward enormous doors flung open into the heat.            Copyright © 2015 by Jeffrey Thomson. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “As my time in Europe was running away, I ran off to Italy with some poetry friends. We wandered Florence and went in to the Basilica di Santa Croce. Now, one of my foundational beliefs is that there is always another layer, another meaning, another story, that our personal perceptions are limited and it is through art that we access the potential to be more than we are. Through that blind man sitting in the piazza and that unfinished fresco in the workshop—in those images—I was trying to point in both these directions: toward my own limitations and toward a larger unfinished and unfinishable narrative.” —Jeffrey Thomson   Jeffrey Thomson is the author of the chapbook The New Faces of Belfast (Anchor & Plume, 2015) and the memoir, Fragile. He teaches at the University of Maine Farmington and lives in Farmington, Maine. Poetry by Thomson   The New Faces of Belfast (Anchor & Plume, 2015) "Traveling Light" by Linda Pastan "The Tinajera Notebook" by Forrest Gander "Crostatas" by Charlie Smith Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038