Maestro Mateo Self-Portrait (c1100 – c1200)
[Sculpture, Portico de la Gloria, The Cathedral
of Santiago de Compostela, Spain]
Minstrel of hammers exiled from my own creation,
I set myself to kneel eternally in prayer
becalmed behind closed lids,
just here,
among the guttering incense
facing the body of James,
apostle of my devotions,
(knowing that, once they had my money in the chests,
the false friars’ would leave their masses)
carved as the curly headed angel of my hopes,
done like the rest in granite
to a black sheen
for verdigris and rose carmethian
bright in the shades of each ones’ humours.
To hear their music
(I mean the angels’)
was my passion always
(I played the harp and laude
until the constant dust
burnt off my fingers from
the delicate magic of their
strings and intervals)
that stays much as I always knew it
choral and organo to my dead ears
in stone.
I gave my lintel angels
each an instrument to touch into the air
in brittle silence,
cold above the arches;
made the kings, apostles and the rest
fratres domini
(as I)
tilt their ingenious heads
-
so each could show his story,
knowing my text
-
better to hear their music of the spheres.
So my great portico
of the earth’s powers
rises from out the stem of Jesse
into glory and hierarchies of heaven
(rendered for Don Fernando’s coin)
sweated through the heat of many summers’
inspiration of the chisel’s claw and smoke
into its many mineral skins
I left behind orphaned from me
in their eternal lives.
More self-portraits on And Other Poems here