St. Luke Drawing a Portrait


 
 
It’s a game of perception.  The Virgin, calm,
attentive, aims the nipple of one small breast
toward the lips of the laughing Infant.  St. Luke,
draped in flowing vermilion, pauses, looks up
from his sketchbook, his fine black-golden
stylus held there motionless.  It’s a portrait
of the artist (van der Weyden); in a corner
behind him, an ox curls under a writing stand,
where a draft of the third Gospel lies open.
Between pillars in the center, beyond the
garden, on a bridge, in the middle distance,
a man and a woman (with their backs to us)
gaze at a river that glides to the horizon.
The man aims his index finger toward
a far-off spit of shoreline, where
a tiny church is barely visible.
       
                                 (This work
the mirror-image of an earlier one, by Jan
van Eyck, The Rolin Madonna: the kneeling 
donor, holding his book, looks up (entranced 
by mother and child) from the opposite side 
of the room (and painting); in the center,
in the deep distance, the same river,
almost the same onlookers.)
              
                             It’s a game
of perception, with multiple mirrors:
that onlooker’s index, pointing almost
out of the scene, circles back to this room:
St. Luke, looking on, is van der Weyden,
looking on: as we are looking on, absorbed
(as that infant soon will be) in the milky flow.