So the chapel needs more dirt, in the language
of the soil mechanic. And then tie rods to hold
the right wall, and then one might request
Michelangelo. But he is on a horse to Bologna,
and years ahead of him lie the years
as subversive, not submissive, to a pope,
though who could see this when looking upwards,
the ceiling so far from view that only
the painter knew half the figures
too small, and the commissioned Christ nowhere
to be seen among the beauty of the flesh of so many
naked bodies, and Sibyls, the Persian Sibyl robed
in softest emerald, God titanic in lavender, and Old Testament
prophets who never dreamed their dreams might come true—
a boy-god brighter than the rabbis and whose father
never touched the boy’s mother,
but to lead her on a donkey, Mother
an updated Leda
surrounded by wings
once assigned to swans.