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Bruno & Saint Francis

Rome: Campo de’ Fiori - Assisi: The Tomb of Saint Francis - The Lower Basilica - The Upper Basilica - Pound: If Only

♰

Across the square looms an enormous statue of Giordano Bruno

martyred in 1600 for his crime of preferring Hermes and Thoth over Jesus,

and looking too deeply into the stars

I wonder what the old Dominican sees now, if anything?

And what will we see, when Khayyam’s cup is empty

and the blue sky has gone back to black?

Will the celestial realms discard him

or is he on a journey he could only have imagined across the navy-blue sky?

♰ 

Assisi: The Tomb of Saint Francis

I sit here in the magnetic silence of the tomb of Saint Francis

dreaming of energy, centripetal motion, and the stars.

I also dream of that old, unquenchable Dream

where spirits circle in the depth of night

and where spiritual energies whirl

beneath our world of sight

until they rest at last

at the still point

of the swirl

ing uni-

vers

e

,

the infinitely large and the infinitely small

like angels dancing on a pin

having at last come

face to

face

.

Is Bruno whirling in the same centripetal sphere as Saint Francis

or is he now writhing in a fire and brimstone cyclone

something that Savonarola might conjure —

one that swirls forever downward

into Dante’s Inferno —

while the mystic

bathes in

light

?

Or

is this all just some

sort of fantasy?

So

skeptical, I

nevertheless wonder

about that otherworldly World

with the cosmos spinning in the night

and pulsing with energy in a Divine Comedy

with its Happy Ending somewhere at the end of stars

like a butterfly floating on the verbal paradox of up and down

 If only. 

I dream of the Spettacolo of the planets and suns

spinning around mystic souls of Light

and among them, most eminent, is Saint Francis

so like Jesus that blood bursts from his palms and feet

Saint Francis, like a Jesus made imminent

in our geography and history,

unlike that other Jesus

far more glorious

and magical

yet

who we struggle

to bring into the everyday light

of geography, history, and a little thing called fact

and lines of vague idealistic poetry that we strive to make concrete.

Yet what does it matter who lived when, or if they lived at all, as long as they help us understand the nature of love?

♰

The Lower Basilica

In the Lower Basilica Saint Francis’ humility is robed in gold, so that this humble man could rise through paradox with angelic wing, past green sea walls and blue heaven skies, two cathedrals high, fresco upon fresco.

I see the simple shoes in a spotless glass case — the “Pantofolo di San Francesco d’Assisi” — walking as if on water, through the air, casting aside gravestones as he climbs the blue and green spaces of the vault, pausing to wonder at the vision of the damned:

On one side he sees the horror of snakes wrapped around their heads, and on the other side blue angels floating around a triple cross, as his saviour hangs there, together with two sinners. A shooting star vaults over Gethsemane, and stigmata blast him downward from the sky, as Calvary and resurrection are born aloft the blue Heaven on angel wings. 

♰

The Upper Basilica

The unseen angels spire into a second cathedral, another planet, galaxy, or universe, rich with golden hues and deep pools of green and blue:

I look upward into these depths and imagine the heavens as oceans with millions of currents punctuated by golden stars:

The pastel stories beneath the ocean teach us (lost as we are in our visions) to go beyond self to serve others. Compassion and sacrifice:

This story takes us from dust to ether, from humble leather shoes to a place that’s further than the wings of Mercury, past Apollo’s sun to the Son. Do the names really matter? Jesus or Saint Francis, Mary the sinner or Mary Mother of God, creation or evolution, God who has no earthly mother, the Son who has no earthly father. The stories wrap around themselves until we escape the form and enter the content. Or enter the content through the form, what does it matter? It all becomes one in the paradox of the deep blue sea, high above us:

In this water a trillion blue souls swim in the ether, past Andromeda and the Hercules Supercluster to another universe altogether. Giordano Bruno waves a leafy hand from some unknown realm, deep in a cavern beneath the waves, far beyond our local Virgo Supercluster of galaxies, past the Corona-Borealis Void, somewhere in the infinity of stars. 

Green pools burst into oceans of blue, colouring the navy depths of space where angels flutter, pulsing from stern to bow. The nave is a sea-born vessel, the body a water-born spirit ascending to the apse, with its stain-glass, blue-green depths of height. Above it all is the turbulent and peaceful, paradoxical sea, punctuated by golden stars.

 ♰

Pound: If Only

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough. (Ezra Pound, 1913)

Waiting in the cafe of the Assisi train station, faces don’t turn into petals. The cappuccinos are strong, but not that strong.

The iPhone can’t cope with the bright daylight, and turns my forehead into light, as if the angels themselves were — it’s 11:55 and the train will soon be on the tracks.

❧

Later, sometime past midnight, I dream of the dark blue sky and the orange haze of Campo de’ Fiori.

🔬

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