Fainting At The Uffizi                      

‘A Gallery . . . Where the eye sweeping over so many

magnificent things, so different, so rare, so sublime,

is overcome by such delight that the soul almost faints.’

~Francesco Bocchi on the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, 1591

At the head of a long stair in the Uffizi,

I felt the sinking of the blood, the thinning

of the wall that separates. I felt myself step through,

sound becoming distant, sight narrowing, unfocusing,

thought beginning to stagger like a drunkard

with a drunkard’s foolish brilliant clarity,

ideas tumbling like balloons held in a net

and suddenly released. At first I thought:

I will lean on this stone font, as I supposed it,

although it was not like a font, but long,

curved inward down the middle like a horse trough,

very old and pitted, beautifully carved.

As I stepped through, I thought:

I will lie down in this blessed horse trough.

I will rest here and be renewed in its holy waters.

But then I thought: this horse trough holds no water.

It is not for water. It is a manger filled with straw.

I will lie down in the straw and rest

and soon my senses will come back to me.

If I could have done it, if I could have climbed up

and spread my body in the kind hollow

of that holy relic, would I have become holy?

Would I, for the time I stepped out of this world,

have become part of that manger’s ancient story,

known what it was like to leave a life clear and vibrant,

full of voices and the colors of the voices’ faces,

and be born into another world, purer than that world,

with a perfection of purity that dooms?

I do not know. I could not make the step. I could not climb.

I could not lay myself out carefully.

When the spirit leaves, the body becomes nothing.

It dissolves away. It is sloughed off. It falls.

Although there is no sense of it, only the waking after,

knowing at once what has happened

because it has happened before, this being and not being

and then being, like a magician’s trick,

like stepping through a mirror to a new world

strangely off and yet identical,

and threatening too, that sense of teetering,

of being pulled at, as though some dark presence

is reluctant to release its hold.

And everybody running with advice:

keep the head lower than the heart, the feet

higher than the head, eat breakfast like your mother told you,

drink no coffee, do drink water, do not climb

four stuffy flights of stairs with jet lag, do not work so hard,

turning to my husband: You must make her, you must

make her do, make her take care of, make her, make . . .

my husband crouching on the floor beside me,

waving them away, telling them it will pass,

it is nothing, she is just a fainter. Make her, make her,

they cry, and he says: Who am I to make her, how can I?

Not knowing how I longed to lie down

in the straw with Christ, to take on his perfection.
 

I cannot climb the Pitti Palace stairs because there are many flights,

         the air is hot and thick, and I am not yet fully recovered

from my fainting spell two days ago. However, I am cheerful

         because today I have made it out into the city to this courtyard,

where I sit on a curved plastic bench with my back against an ancient

         palace wall. I am waiting for my husband, who is not a fainter,

while around me, tourists are eating peaches, thick sugar cookies,

         thin flat racks of chicken ribs, or maybe it is rabbit.

Last night we went to dinner at the Ristorante Omero,

         where we sat, happy above Florence, sipping Pinot Grigio

and studying the menu. I ordered pigeon and he came sprawled out

         on my plate, to put it bluntly, flat as road-kill. Poor thing,

I pitied him. He seemed to have been tanned, like leather, although

         the menu called for grilling. And he had been through violence:

his beheading, the ripping of his feathers from the complicated flesh,

         the draining of his blood, the savage dislocation of his limbs.

And then that flattening, his laying out, so to speak, which I suppose

         was undertaken by a strong chef with a cooking mallet,

who, when he had given him a pasting to his satisfaction,

         spread oils and sauces on his ruined body as if to heal the wounds,

a trick though, there was to be no healing, but his introduction

         to a sort of hell, the flame working to destroy

whatever hint of life was left. And then the last humiliation:

         the spreading of his tortured body on my plate.

I confess, my taste buds stood up at attention, waters broke

         inside my mouth. For a moment I wanted to do it to him,

to sink my teeth into his flesh and to devour him,

         crunching on his bones, but when I set my fork on him

and touched him with my knife, something happened,

         something rose up out of him, like an odor, light, elusive,

rising with the other odors. What was it? Suffering?

         Can suffering be smelled? Although it was not just an odor.

There was something else mixed in with it. A sound?

No, something less and yet more forceful, an idea perhaps,

         the idea of a sound, the idea of a living creature’s

final sound, not the sound of a body crying out, but of a spirit

         vanishing, the scent of vanishing, the odor of a sound.

And I fell to wondering: how was this creature murdered?

         And others like him? Is the bird taken in the hands

and the neck twisted? Is the head chopped off, or sliced?

         Is there a machine for it? A harvester? And where do all

the heads go, with their shocked apologetic eyes?

I felt ashamed. I set my fork down on the table, pushed my knife away.

         My husband said, ‘You are not well? You’re feeling faint again?’

and because I did not want to spoil his evening, I said, ‘No,

         it’s just the richness of Italian cooking,’ at which he nodded,

eating pasta, eating truffles, nothing slaughtered. He could not

         hear the odor that assails me still today in this courtyard

of the Pitti Palace, with its ancient flagstones and its naked fig-leafed

         men of muscled marble, meat-eaters every one of them, its ghosts

of Medicis and crumbled dovecotes with so many fluttering doves~

that sound

                              that delicately

                                                            perfumed

resonance of air