San Sepolcro by Jorie Graham

Jorie Graham is one of the more well-known contemporary poets, and this is a great poem. She moves deftly from strand to strand--from a landscape to the mind, to a painting, to the act of birth--and the moves seem natural. How and why she weaves those strands together is one of the poem's rewards. In her more recent books, Graham's poems are harder to follow, so if you like this one, I'd start with the early stuff. Erosion is a terrific book.



San Sepolcro
By Jorie Graham

In this blue light
I can take you there,
snow having made me
a world of bone
seen through to. This
is my house,

my section of Etruscan
wall, my neighbor's
lemontrees, and, just below
the lower church,
the airplane factory.
A rooster

crows all day from mist
outside the walls.
There's milk on the air,
ice on the oily
lemonskins. How clean
the mind is,

holy grave. It is this girl
by Piero
della Francesca, unbuttoning
her blue dress,
her mantle of weather,
to go into

labor. Come, we can go in.
It is before
the birth of god. No one
has risen yet
to the museums, to the assembly
line--bodies

and wings--to the open air
market. This is
what the living do: go in.
It's a long way.
And the dress keeps opening
from eternity

to privacy, quickening.
Inside, at the heart,
is tragedy, the present moment
forever stillborn,
but going in, each breath
is a button

coming undone, something terribly
nimble-fingered
finding all of the stops.






Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950 and spent her youth in Italy.





The painting is here

San Sepolcro
Piero Della Francesca