The Murmur of Myrrh

         Kate Capato’s, The Lilly, 2017. Oil in canvas. 

In Solomon’s canticle the groom, a radical, is unavailable.  

And yet I am here, to see you through canvas — just a double 

plane — to query about the lily, a white mirror of our rebirth.  

Petal and pistil trumpet the Passion with an oppression 

in the dint of their reaching stare, above the brush cut.

I hear each gilden nimbus mingle to hazily simulate a cymbal.

The glassy percussion seems to summon my question,

“Where is He, the groom, in the throne room?” 

You reply, “Seeing Him is deferrable for the inevitable seventy-two hours 

in Joseph of Arimathea’s chalkish limestone tomb.” Show us the roses,

Theotokos. Eloquent action against the underdevelopment of hope 

has had the Polish pope sketch theology of anatomy. 

But oddly, here you are, in oil, not a chrism of the artist’s chroma, 

but a prism of emotion housed in your constant schism 

between earthly and eternal, not a tragic myth or a Lazarus. 

Yet you, My Subject, do take an adjective, in altered laughter, 

from the color analysis of your eyes. Are they brown-pear? No, ocher?

If pear, Our Queen, then I’m in error. If pear, then there is a promise here, 

in the hue on our canvas, that you grant us assistance.

Yet above your headlights, your lingering eyebrows hover. 

While the lashes dash towards them, praying for grace above your two eye ovals. 

Inside, your irises roll right like the yoke in two eggs, 

standing on the wide end and elliptically tilted on a plate 

that is slightly sloped. Is it one stare, probing infinity, demurely assessing 

the prospect and all three meanings of love? Who else is there?  

Grant us that thick hair. Dressed in a blended blue hue of aqua 

and celeste, his palm and your ring finger consummate a third party: 

Add the scarf, and that makes a trilogy! 

An azure, to your vision, is passing through the faithful geyser Gabriel.  

Whose right forefinger purports a cell phone with a call that’s now your own,

 transmitted to your fingers which reach like a tuner’s palm; 

your hand’s shadow running the piano wire, bringing a new 

duration to the treble of our earthly vessel.  A harp, lute or spinet? 

So I listen, using synesthesia, like the gift of multimedia, 

to expose a partridge song in a hasty, penetrating high-C, 

singing the briefest interjection of “hello” in three’s:  “Hi, hi, hi!” 

Lilies now share their fragrance to the tableau: 

It’s appropriate to kneel in the Upper Room, as the sommelier 

will bring a clove metaphor to the red wine’s phenol aroma.

And perhaps the black licorice, of Nicodemus LLC, manufactured 

in Secaucus, above the slightly brackish meadowland on a loamy 

knoll, where all grass is flesh.  Beyond the fence, 

and through the triptych archway, the sound of a water flow

leaves an alluvial deposit beneath the brambling brook. 

Its noise gurgling in an attempt at song, 

a distant echo to David whose semitic descendent has come.