Dolorosa
after Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio's “Death of the Virgin” (c. 1601-03)

Death may have taken its time coming,
lending a slip of pallor to the clay, idling
among the stones and furrows in the orchard,

wringing the towel with the body's water
and effluvia into the pewter basin—It's still here,
in this room where the light tenders its departure,

a weight that causes Magdalen to double over.
Her coiled braids make me want to sob, her dress
the moldering tint of peaches in summer, her nape

caught in the last rays of sun falling from a high window.
Grown men with balding pates and pilgrims' beards
stand under a canopy, leathered red muted with sienna,

that Caravaggio paints as an inverted triangle
suspended from the ceiling. They know
whose death they grieve, who were themselves

expelled from out of that first small paradise
between their mothers' ovaries.  And so
they weep open-mouthed or into their hands,

forgetting shame. John the Younger
can barely hold up his head.  The body
in death, so difficult to behold—

the seamed bodice(also red) drawn tight
over the liver's cloudy ampules and perforated
kidneys.  Her peasant's feet, unshod and

bloated with edema.  Here is the brown and careworn face,
the tangle of hair and its brittle halo, the thickened arms
outstretched along the plank, exhausted fingers—

Fingers still shapely like my mother's, many years ago
when she held me before a camera after Sunday mass,
smoothed her skirt of cotton voile and tossed

her veil and rope of hair behind one shoulder
—so young, so unafraid of what it meant
to have conceived her child out of wedlock.

(for Cresencia Rillera Buccat)

First published in Crab Orchard Review, fall/winter 2006;
The 2006 Richard Peterson Poetry Prize