by Arne Weingart
After Adoration of the Magi by Sandro Botticelli
That’s me on the right, holding myself apart, as usual, and giving you the stink-eye.
Don’t take it personally, it’s never meant that way, just a habit of my trade.
And check out the white horse’s head on the far left, looking at you in exactly the same way.
“Don’t blame us,” we seem to say, “None of this was my idea.”
I tend to take things literally, in life and in art, and not ask too many questions—
I don’t know about the horse. But Venus, blown ashore ravishing yet innocent
on her mammoth scallop shell, is as likely to have happened as the Messiah’s virgin birth—
I find it takes either myth or miracle to fully gather our attention, and there’s beauty in both,
even if unsupported by gravity or anatomy or fact. People will pay to see the strangest things
hanging on their wall. First, let’s dispose of the peacock. Although linked to eternal life
or my own vanity, let’s just concede I might have needed a big, self-important bird for
balance, both architectonic and social—this tableau threatens to drown in self-regard—
from Jesus on down. Birds, in their indifference, can help. Rome, ever ascendant
in this first year of counting up from zero, is represented by massive, ruined columns
off in the distance, supporting nothing but themselves, from whose entablatures
random grasses sprout. The manger is a study in decay, with its one corner wall
of Jerusalem stone keeping nothing in or out or up. Local herbs have taken root
in what masonry remains. The three kings, it must be said, are here strictly on business.
Reverential as they wish to appear, it’s good politics to get on the right side of a god
on his way up. The cost is merely a few vials of frankincense or myrrh or a fistful of gold
and the time it takes to lay them at his feet. There may be occasion, later on,
to call in a favor. Mary and Joseph look exhausted—it was a long walk from Egypt
just to end up in this crummy hovel. They sense their story is already over,
that it was never even meant to be much of a story despite the best efforts of minor writers.
Jesus himself offers no clue of what’s to come, despite the star’s pointing
its longest ray of light at him like a dagger and the faint halo that hovers discretely
above his head. No one ever looks entirely comfortable wearing a halo. There is, however,
one portent, one sign that I took care to hide. Look on the ground amongst the footwear
more Florentine than biblical, next to the majus wearing conspicuous red, just above
that ridiculous Venetian hat somehow cast aside. There it is, a golden crown down in the dirt,
not the kind of thing, modest though it appears, that anyone would ever lose track of.
True worldly power always has a little dirt on it. The question here is who will finally
notice and pick it up—one of the indifferent, distracted rabble, an oriental king
looking for a back-up plan, the peacock who suddenly decides to bring back something
gaudy and useless to its nest, or the worn-out virgin in search of a plaything
before the savior spouts his first parable? There is a rumor I died broke and forgotten,
used up by the Medicis and what was left of the Renaissance. And one Inquisition
or another would have figured out that I loved Beauty more than God. However
one makes one’s way, either afoot or heels held tight in the silver stirrups of the finest saddle
on the whitest of white horses, anything, so say the Gospels, is possible here on earth.
Arne Weingart's poetry collections include Levitation for Agnostics, winner of the 2014 New American Press Poetry Prize, Unpractical Thinking, winner of the 2019 Red Mountain Press Poetry Prize, and Concentration (FutureCycle Press), recently adapted and performed as a one-act play. Prizes for individual poems include those offered by The Sow's Ear Poetry Review, the Frost Foundation, and The Moth's Nature Writing Competition (judged by Helen Macdonald). Work has been anthologized in Border Lines, Poems of Migration (Knopf), and Poets Meet Politics (Hungry Hill Writing). He and his wife Karen live in Chicago.