Perspective

Perspective

   In medieval paintings, the cobbler stood just inches high
   beside the saints, who rose like water towers,
   until Brunelleschi thought up single point perspective,

   and proved it, lines receding to a speck on the horizon.
       Once people saw it, they couldn't forget:
   the statues and churches kneeling to just one lover.

   How thrilling! To stand at the commanding point.
       Each of us at the center! It's the great
   myth of the personal. Dutiful art teachers swung

   the myth in buckets to the next teachers
       until generations later, it bears
   the heft of Truth. That is, it did, until the night

   I drove the death car, when the sky slit open
       to admit two headlights, double moons
   drilling larger and larger holes through darkness

   as they bore their terrible gift, two thousand pounds
           of metal toward me, and suddenly I saw the flaw
   in Brunelleschi's myth of the personal. Which of us

   can bear to hold the whole world on his lap?
   I swerved then, or something swerved me,
   spinning the steel off center so the car did not kill me.

   Instead, I floated briefly, picking the lock of the improbable,
       feeling like a patron suspended
   in a medieval painting--that one wearing

   his everyday red hat and blue cloak,
       keeping his face businesslike,
   trying not to say AhHa as he strides up the golden sky.

COPYRIGHT 2006 The Christian Century Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning