Piero della Francesca’s resurrection

What thoughts did Piero della Francesca have
When he painted the fresco of the Resurrection?
Was it a bright day in Sansepolcro
As he applied the pigments on the lime and sand?
Anyway, the real brush is the mind,
The light can slant to put the hand
In shadow, but the mind remains on fire.

Piero was a mathematician, and knew that,
In his case, numbers escape
And disguise themselves as colors,
Especially at dawn, when half-asleep the eyes
Let go of the calculus of grief and life,
And there are claims by Vasari
That Piero had gone blind in old age,
Which is sad, because life is nothing
But light to a painter.

In fact, this afternoon had been too full of dazzle
To last, as though the misgivings
About the coming night have faded
In the west, way beyond the islands,
Whose ghosts visit our gaze every morning.

The world has the tenderness of fruit
About to fall, which, with his brush, the artist
Must be ready to capture at any moment,
Hoping that it stays in the air long enough
To stretch the moment’s brightness to its limits,
Much like a dewdrop rolling down a leaf,
Holding out for as long as it can to gather into itself
All that it wishes us to remember.

And so what does Piero della Francesca
Want me to keep in mind
As I gaze at his fresco of the Resurrection?
I see the risen Christ about to step out
Of a sarcophagus, a foot set forward,
Like an athlete before a race, his right hand
Holding the banner of victory.

Death breaks the mirror into fragments,
Which by ourselves we cannot put together,
But we are promised a light that will reveal
All of the world whose view we have lost,
A dawn in which as yet time seesaws
Between growth and decline.

And time is not just you and me together
In a coffee shop, watching the ships
Hurrying west towards sunset, while to the south,
Blazing with the last rays of the day,
White herons fly their last journey before dark,
And couples wait by the sea
Like candles melting with desire.

The wait can be a sleep in each other’s arms,
Or a sleep induced when time faces
The eternity that perhaps it fails
To understand, which might be the sleep
Of the guards below the sarcophagus
(One of them being Piero himself,
The one whom Christ’s staff touches.)

By the way, how fitting that the fresco should lead
To the hall of judges, who prayed
Before the painting as they entered,
Such that, as someone mentioned,
The fresco of the Resurrection “protects the judge
And purifies the judged,” not to mention that
The judge himself needs purifying.

As can happen, the sunshine that enters his courtroom,
Because of the arrangement of the interior,
May not reach the inside of his chambers.

There’s nothing that blows my mind
More than the Resurrection of Christ,
Which makes every painting on the subject
Deserving of Aldous Huxley’s comment
On Piero della Francesca’s work,

“It stands before us in entire
And actual splendor, the greatest picture
In the world.” Perhaps, what makes it so
Is its power to make us see with eyes closed,
As though in prayer, which is a kind of sleep
That is awake, a death that is alive,
In which every noise is a song,
Every word a soft mention of one’s name,
And every look a vision of a world in which
Everything flies.