Caravaggio, "The Conversion of Saint Paul"

From Thomas Gunn, "In Santa Maria del Popolo"

Waiting for when the sun an hour or less

Conveniently oblique makes visible

The painting on one wall of this recess


By Caravaggio, of the Roman School,


I see how shadow in the painting brims


With a real shadow, drowning all shapes out


But a dim horse’s haunch and various limbs,


Until the very subject is in doubt.

But evening gives the act, beneath the horse

And one indifferent groom, I see him sprawl,


Foreshortened from the head, with hidden face,


Where he has fallen, Saul becoming Paul.


O wily painter, limiting the scene


From a cacophony of dusty forms


To the one convulsion, what is it you mean


In that wide gesture of the lifting arms?

…I turn, hardly enlightened, from the chapel


To the dim interior of the church instead,


In which there kneel already several people,


Mostly old women: each head closeted


In tiny fists holds comfort as it can.


Their poor arms are too tired for more than this
--

For the large gesture of solitary man,

Resisting, by embracing, nothingness.