Leonardo’s Annunciation
It is gravitas, the gray of quarry stone, the burden
of the middle plane, the moving toward the heavy hour
the angels come, bearing grief whose name is benediction.
The beauty here is of ornament—the lectern, the cassone—
both calculations. The trees, serialized, the lilies limned with gilt,
as if Leonardo had copied an exercise from his notebook, the flowers
have the aridity of the secondhand, for what is more melancholy
than exactitude, the graphite stick’s precision that imitates
the economy of doubt: it is so small it can be used again.

The balustrade divides the plane in half: the negative space
like dark water that stops the heart of the one
who looks the longest down, because between duty
and inspiration is a wall, between the heart and its desires,
an obfuscation, so the work is flawless, hence oblique,
no incarnation. It records, instead, the scrutiny
of exactly how one failed in Verocchio’s studio, over time—
propped against the wall and taken out
to be looked at and to do again.