Do you think that when first presented with
that enclosed heaven above the Pope,
Michelangelo stopped for a moment,
then maybe a longer one, and still more,
as he attempted to count how many strokes
it would actually take to paint that sky?
How many times his arm would have to
conduct an arc, from down to palette,
back above his head, again and again
and again and again and again. Did he think
about how the brush would stay in his grasp?
The pen is slipping away from me into
horizontal weariness as I write this, contemplate
this one single, un-fluid flow. The autistic part
of me is not going to be happy until it can
at least guess some sort of recognisable
answer to such an insane question. We can
even begin to construct a formula: x strokes
per hour times days times years minus whatever
the assistants did. Haven’t you yet boggled at
the still way-off number this crude estimate
puts out? If I was a girl, I would always demand
a portrait. That’d be a real sign, true effort,
devotion; not just some words scribbled down
on a page while he’s probably thinking of some
other girl he’d like to write a poem about, in which
in which she’s having her picture painted,
her soul pinned.