I.
Been blind for a while now.
The air is thick.
Short of breath. Yet within me
something sparkles, burns bright,
I cry quietly, because
Pisa is far.
I could not fly, hence
stretching from my mind’s staircase
I brought the skies down to them,
the planets, so close, I could have
wound the rings of Saturn
around my fingers,
if I wanted.
Noise from the street
shattered the silence, life
goes on, I am
an insignificant spec of dust.
I could not fly,
but my spirit soared,
higher even than the birds.
No one believes me.
The telescope will stand unused,
perhaps all will be lost when I’m gone.
“Pendulum-swinging fool”
-I heard countless times,
I even laughed at them
in secret.
I entered a secret world,
my lonesome self, a world from which
there is no escape.
I see that the sky is infinite.
Everything repeats
and replicates within it.
But why do my thoughts sparkle,
if I am but an audacious bolt of light,
striking at that which will
irreversibly break?
II.
Grew up around music.
I can bear only the purest
sounds, the purest in
all things, since my baptism
under the acanthian columns
of the Battistero. The truth.
Still, as a blind man, I.
My bleary, blood-shot eyes
see only inward now.
But I see Him, as I march toward
the soothing darkness of non-existence.
He guides me. Is there an afterlife?
I could have burned at the stake. As Bruno.
Would’ve been better, perhaps…
But I know, the Pope fears me,
hence I avoided
punishment by fire,
I am merely imprisoned
here.
At first he believed me…
I brought the skies down to them,
and what was my reward?
Voices trail off, words stumble,
promises whither away.
But I see Him. The fever subsides.
Dreadful labyrinths haunt me
no more. The storm within me has passed,
this must be the last phase of
the initiation:
Quietude, and slowly streaming teardrops.
III.
And then, only death…
No tempest.
My heart beats the
tempo of the sacrificial dance,
my creaking bones
mimic the rhythm. And the bells…
I hear the bells, still.
Hardly anyone comes. Let them cower.
Sounds seep in from outside,
but I am not alone:
Simplicius
sits by my bedside,
as lance-heads of pain torment me.
Wretched body!
I brought them the Moon,
its forever-dance, its craters.
Showed them the Sun’s flecked underside,
today I can hardly sit upright.
I always believed in God.
No matter what they said.
(Marina and the kids would say
I am the Devil’s accomplice.)
I burned bridges.
What remained?
If there is no afterlife, so be it.
All steel orbs eventually
settle at the bottom.
We are all prisoners.
I did not want a new world, but merely
to know the one we have, here.
I brought them
the Earth, on my back,
sacrificed my spine,
all along
seeking my truth along
paths unfamiliar.
And yet it moves.