Lapis Lazuli

We walked like loosed snakes

in a tin can tethered by our ears

to the guide leading with her

antenna topped in an orange bow

bobbing up and down many stairs of the

Museo Vaticani into the Chapel

then out down a hallway of of maps

past glorious window views of the garden clipped its depths, distances, purposes unknown.

 

Museo Vaticani is a palace of

unmovable feet in stone

incontinent muffled voices

living bodies injected vertically

into an ever moving flow

constant, erratic, unremitting

past tens of thousands

of stones, and coins, and books

and masks, and cloth, and weapons

and painting, and sculpture, and fragments

and dreams, and phantasms

of great beauty and horror

beyond comprehension

surely beyond remembering.

 

As if by a laser pointer

maybe a dozen objects

were illuminated by her voice red light

through our inevitable path

across thousands of years.

 

Inset in the floor protected

by felt rope was lapis lazuli

shuffled by millions each year

raising the dust of

millenniums to fall upon it

obscuring the treasured

so rare and costly a

pigment used to only grace

the robes of saints and angels.

 

Pulled from the earth for

5000 years in Afghanistan

then packed by men across

the earth to be traded

treasured and died for

as the pigment of

queens, kings, and potentates

begged for by their artists

shaped into the eyes

of the gods.

 

And here it is inset in the

floor of the Museo Vaticani

unable to stop and linger

hover over it

absorb the color into my eyes

pounded into pigment

mixed with oils and resins

the tail of the snake

pushes ahead

and inevitably I do bend

with regret.

 

Ave Maria, Florida

June 16, 2016

Roma Series

@2016 âLapis Lazuli â Joseph Yarbrough

Reproduction prohibited without written permission

Done