Da Vinci - poem

DA VINCI

The last skein of day has unraveled
and there's only this lone sprig of guttering candlelight
tossed against the walls.
It's 1506 in Milan, and dark.
In the fluorescent hum of the twentieth century
it wouldn't be enough for much of anything,
this single candle set against the night.
Maybe light enough to pull a lover close
for a steamy Hollywood clinch,
or to meet someone named Jimmy the Weasel
under the flickering "i"
in a broken-down neon sign
above Danny's Diner. But it's
1506 in Milan, and

all across Europe burghermeisters, merchants, pilgrims
and Friends of the Crown
are beating back the cold with strong drink and story.
Enough splinters of the True Cross are being hawked
to build an ark. The night
has its pleasures -- ask any boozy frequenter
of the upstairs rooms at the Crossed Swords Inn,
where the women are tossed from man to man like dice.
But for Leonardo it's a different kind of pleasure this night.
He's slicing into the jaundiced flesh of a scullery maid,
newly dead of the sixteenth century's generic hurt,
a "fever and a chill". He's gingerly moving aside
her visceral organs -- lovingly almost --
because he wants to know. Because
there's always one more question
burning down the waxy length of the night.
What's the secret of a bird's languorous glide?
What makes a wall
web through with cracks in winter?
How to render the world onto canvass
with all the sweet definition it deserves?
There aren't even words yet for what he wants.
He's after what comprises a man,
Or, more properly on this night, a woman.
So he's peeling her open
and the stench is enough to...
but he wants to know. He's
tracing her arterial byways
and each delicate, fluted vein
branches off into a new world of questions.
It's true that Columbus is filling the sails of Europe
with a vigorous new trade wind;
that Martin Luther is about to nail the Church to the wall;
that Copernicus, too, is hearing a new music of the spheres.
But above all, Leonardo.
Because he's parting the watery stew
of what was once a life, and sketching.
Because he's smudging and revising now.
Because it's cold and his fingers ache,
yet still he's probing deeper.
Who hasn't wanted everything in his time?
But who ever wanted it as much as Leonardo?
From the muscular sweep
of rechanneling the Arno,
down to the least fibrous tremble
in a sleeper's eye
closing long after midnight.