Thirty Pieces - by A Frances Johnson

ISLAND | issue 159
Judas image fragment.jpg

After Piero Della Francesca, ‘The Betrayal of Jesus (Kiss of Judas)’, 1304

You hang, peerless, around the edges

of friendship. Want more than to swing

in a biblical sunset, play villain in a

cloud-hammered story with ‘good cop’

twisting your head into the back of a car.

Artists show you apart, chipped black nails,

red-eyed and hesitant, painting yourself

back in, seizing the brush. I was so much

more, you whine, plea-bargains

congealing under conservation gloss.

  

The figures came up. Thirteen.

Numbers couldn’t save you, already

betrayed by his not loving you most.

The pain cracked your marbled temper,

conjured shadows of darker arts.

How to say you yearned to unclasp

his dusty robe, utter rubied vowels:

Sav-i-o-u-r! Now, storms batter bearded

Galilee. Fake a kiss and fake it quickly;

break the brush that tells too much

or too little. The girl who saw silver lucre

change hands – bury her in a cave

she can’t exit. Call this love, untransfigured.

 

By Thursday, the chosen one peels Maundy

grapes in stagey fashion, confides to Simon

that flagellation’s a walk in the park, paternal

abandonment – a no-brainer at thirty-three.

He’s moved out. He’s yet moved. He’s moving on,

you think. With a hyena’s nickel-plated laugh,

chasms open under your bunioned feet.

Later, you describe his mother’s sun-spotted hands.

She kneels in cloaked blue-gold but she’s

half weather system, half art, a body of cloud,

back-lit – Tiepolo’s best uncertainty.

 

There’s more to it, you want to tell her;

that you alone understood her son’s cruelled

vanity. But words paint strange. Her eyes,

twin nebulas flecked with gilt, regard

your blank mouth and ash-palette face

with the unblinking mien of the already

ascended. Before supper, her only son saw you

merge with spying, sleeping gardens,

waking to pentimenti of thorn and briar.

When they cuffed the good gardener, temple

guards in your brain fired a last appeal:

It’s not too late! But you loped away

with your bled bag of silver to the old city gate.

Three days on, your convicted lord is bawling

like a baby – for water, vinegar, father.

You close your ears until sleep comes,

wake gagging in a boat of stinking fish.

You feel worse than ever, knowing painters,

not the devil, will come after you for eternity.

Victorian melodrama is what you fear most.

He made me do it, you mutter,

stringing thick rope over cedar.

 

In the wild dark quiet, no desert stone

sorrows. It’s your turn to kick the bucket

into time, Judas, cry out to the livid sunset:

My God, My God! Black is a colour too!

Image: fragment from ‘The Torture of the Jew’
by Piero Della Francesca,
Church of San Francesco, Arezzo;
part of the cycle the Legend of the True Cross (1452-55)


This poem appeared in Island 159 in 2020. Order a print issue here.

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A Frances Johnson

A Frances Johnson’s fourth poetry collection, Save As, was published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2021. A previous collection, Rendition for Harp and Kalashnikov (Puncher & Wattmann, 2017), was shortlisted in the 2018 Melbourne Prize for Literature Best New Writing Award. Other books include the novel Eugene’s Falls (Arcadia, 2007), which retraces the journeys of colonial painter Eugene von Guérard. Her poem ‘My Father’s Thesaurus’ won the 2020 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. She teaches poetry at the University of Melbourne.

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