Jacopone: House
David Gewanter
Concrete foot dripped from a barrel,
a keystone that fits no door; spackle,
horsehair, and newspulp
firm this house in which
LOVE is locked:
Its home-birth staggers the waiting soul
that falls gasping, soul whose groans
and panic drain from the house,
puddling from lintel and downspout
onto the champing gravel
where now stoop the chalky
moonflesh lovers, outlyers dabbing
chilled fingers and foreheads clean
of dissolution—nightly they huddle at
the ditch, servile
and expectant, yet this house
makes domestic no man
or woman, its entries are
caulked and braced against them…
Bound and silent LOVE, treasure held beyond the reach of thieves—
Suppliant lovers, the candles you cup
burn your hands, secrets wheeze
from your clamped mouths;
the gifts that belly your satchels—
unguents and molded glass,
baubles from Chair City, Knife City—
have pried open gates, curtains, legs…
until now: House, silent as
a frozen ship, crystalline blue
under
a thin, coppered rainbow—
Wordless and exhausted is
the soul attendant on LOVE;
and happy, too, the soul sealed inside
the counting-house,
dried of desire—soul, a happy clam
displayed forever before LOVE
the famished Lodger,
his scrupulous hands cooling
the bone china,
his throat stoppered against flesh and tears and sound….
**Note on “Jacopone: House”** In 1268, Jacopo dei Benedetti, a fashionable lawyer in the Tuscan town of Todi, pulled his mortally wounded wife Vanna from a collapsed banquet platform. He found that she wore a hair-shirt under her gown; undergoing a conversion, he lived as a ragged penitent in Todi, and later joined the Franciscans. Known as Jacopone, he wrote over 90 poems called “Lauds,” considered “the most powerful religious poetry in Italy before Dante’s time” (Serge Hughes, Jacopone da Todi, xix). This is a free version of Laud 77.
