Fourth of Several Manifestos in the Voices of the Dead

Rembrandt Addresses the 1960s and 70s

You will move from black
 and white to color, 
  from an etched world

to an urban landscape of vivid oils
 that will scare and stun
  everyone already

drawn in her best grays and blacks on paper,
 line and outline of a leg,
  her covered curves so clear.

Look back, I think, rather than ahead
 to the glossy magazine and the Soup Cans,
  and the neon Dutch Masters

on the billboard just outside the Queens Tunnel.
  You will find your way into photographs
  and acrylics, and will paint

so fiercely at times that your arms
 will go numb. This will go ahead and happen.
  So you’ll need your rest. Lie down.

I will come to you in a series of dreams and whisper
 die meeste ende di naetuereelste beweechgelickheijt 
  and you will believe until you wake

that I really did see Christ being lifted from the ground,
 heavy as a plastic sack of seed, fallen from a truck,

that I really did see his guards (like the men
 in the grainy video of Vietnam, Munich, 
  Selma, El Salvador, the Moon)

confounded by the sudden appearance of flesh and color,
 that I knew their desire to return to a world 
  of shades and shadow rather than this one,

its ridiculous deaths and resurrections everywhere, 
colored in a television light so harsh I cannot begin
  to find it in a human eye.

The Holy Women at the Sepulchre, Duccio di Buoninsegna, 1308-1311.

This morning, I am the woman in orange. 
 My sister, the faithful mother in green, 
  and someone we know well is the harlot 
   in her fading scarlet pleats.

Our heads, sweet Duccio, so identical and round, 
 so filled with a species of love
  like duty and doubt,
   defy pious hands.
   
You give us a Tuscan angel, extracted from Matthew,
 modeled on our brothers, our husbands,
  and perched on the emptied sepulchre
   like a bird, or a bat.

Our varieties of myrrh, he suggests, you suggest
 without words,  our various aloes might as well 
  be poured onto the ground, 
   absorbed in sand.
     
Dead Duccio, we knew your children who gave away
 their inheritance to their mother,
  blessed woman who mixed these pigments
   that settle into our strong faces.

Dead Duccio, every morning of our lives at mass
 one woman or another rises up again, as a mountain,
  as a mourner on a stuccoed wall that opens 
   into a Gospel we bless with our open eyes.