CRITICA

Venerable old Titian
painting with fingers and brushes
in a time of plague
paints his first and last Pietà,
the white marble colored sacrificed Christ
held in his somber mother’s arms.
A kneeling Jerome
(really Titian)
 tenderly touches Christ’s hand as
Mary Magdalene turns in horror,
all flanked by Moses and the Hellespontine Sybil,
both turned to stone,
under a funereal niche.

His vision of death
Christ’s tomb
really Titian’s tomb
to be placed on Titian’s real tomb
old Titian’s last painting
his vision of his own death.

Those brush strokes
are Titian’s living gestures
left in paint
an actual memorial
as emotional as
a mother’s caress
in childhood.

Those small flicks
of the brush, each
stroke separate but
like the ice and rock that
swirl together from afar
to create the rings of Saturn
those brush strokes
create haunted
shades, mourning, grief.

And just as we step back and
they come together
to create a whole,
we lean in close
and the painting dissolves
into brushstrokes,
dissolves into meaninglessness,

like my father
whose body burned
and dissolved into
ash sits on
the dining room table.