Gabriel Levin – Jerome

<em>for Shimon Sandbank</em>

Walled in by the desert, he had no patience
for the solitary rigours of monks in rags
and, notwithstanding the brushwork of pinched
flesh-tints (the wasting away and slag
of self-immolation) displayed on canvas and panel,
the barometer of his affections drew him
elsewhere and turned him into a pupil
of Hebrew, “this language of hissing and grim
aspirates”. But I see him as Antonello
da Messina – who brought to Venice the secrets
of oil glazing – saw him: in the airiness
of his study, where the play of light mellows
chapter and verse, propped on his desk,
on which he trains his mind in muted bliss.
– He who’d pleaded, “Step out, I beg you, a little
from your body,” scrapes back his chair
and treads three steps down, while the peaceable
lion pads in the cloister with nowhere
to go, lost in a perspective that fools the eye
and bids the heart to linger in the domed
mansion, at noon-tide, amid the cries
of swifts, glimpsed through the high windows,
seeding the air. To live and move
under the veritable Bethlehem skies, and thrust
the hand into the flame translating the Good
Book for everyman, and day by day to prove
how words might heave and break the crust,
the hard Judean soil, and serve as food.