In Santa Maria del Popolo

Waiting for when the sun an hour or less Conveniently oblique makes visible The painting on one wall of this recess By Caravaggio, of the Roman School, I see how shadow in the painting brims With a real shadow, drowning all shapes out But a dim horse’s haunch and various limbs, Until the very subject is in doubt. But evening gives the act, beneath the horse And one indifferent groom, I see him sprawl, Foreshortened from the head, with hidden face, Where he has fallen, Saul becoming Paul. O wily painter, limiting the scene From a cacophony of dusty forms To the one convulsion, what is it you mean In that wide gesture of the lifting arms? No Ananias croons a mystery yet, Casting the pain out under name of sin. The painter saw what was, an alternate Candor and secrecy inside the skin. He painted, elsewhere, that firm insolent Young whore in Venus’ clothes, those pudgy cheats, Those sharpers; and was strangled, as things went, For money, by one such picked off the streets. I turn, hardly enlightened, from the chapel To the dim interior of the church instead, In which there kneel already several people, Mostly old women: each head closeted In tiny fists holds comfort as it can. Their poor arms are too tired for more than this --For the large gesture of solitary man, Resisting, by embracing, nothingness. From “Moly and My Sad Captains” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). 1973 Thom Gunn. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Thom Gunn is the winner of the 1988 Robert Kirsch Award. See First Page.