At his birth, in the yard a chicken
scratched after seeds,
spirals of Stars and lichen,
scarried Albano, tracks of seas;
child to man: one vision is lacing
painted braids and a backward scrawl
with gusts of breath erasing
his “Supper,” on a dank wall.

Unfinished Jerome and the lion
linger together outside a cave,
Alexanders, kings, Napoleon
leap over the stage,
“And I will make mortars and guns,”
he wrote, to Ludovico, the Moor,
submarines, pre-imagined
instruments of modern war.

Leda’s twin twists the swan covers,
shrouded smile of St. Anne,
near a twilit grotto, Grace hovers:
a Virgin’s foreshortened hand;
toothless the flesh-carved crania
he pursued in Milan,
at Cloux, a Gioconda smirked
at the furrowed crag of a man.
Mountains that cataracts heave
over plains, to a sea’s devotions,
“because from a confusion of shapes
come many wonderful inventions,”
unyielding, unerupted
the smile and the storm’s rage,
his hand lifting
trembles above the page.

Mountains: how volcanic sources
slip grain by grain to the sea!—
armored tanks, fat-haunched horses,
equestrian reveries,
designs, in flux, forces
of wind and water and wax,
all technological resources:
half-executed clay facts.

—Teresa Iverson