Thirty Pieces - by A Frances Johnson
ISLAND | issue 159
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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