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All the Troubles I have Borne
In 1508 Michelangelo
began to fresco the barrel-vaulted ceiling.
He started in the beginning
and finished four years later in a flood.
Near the end of it he could
no longer look down or even straight ahead.
In order to read a letter
he had to raise it over his paint-spackled face.
He was 38 and damn tired.
“I am much troubled and physically exhausted,”
he once wrote his brother.
“I have no friends, nor do I want any.”
But the ceiling he left glowed,
a breathtaking panoply of unearthly light;
and shining near the center,
Adam, his limp finger nearly touching the finger of God.
In 1536 Michelangelo
returned to work on the chapel’s altar wall,
his astonishing last judgment:
high Renaissance rendered boneless skin.
He worked on into his 89th year.
Rich, he kept to a squalid hovel in a dismal Roman
alley named Crow’s Slaughter.
He slept in a bare room on a straw mattress.
One cold day in 1564
Michelangelo lay down. “I am undone,” he confided.
His body was stolen, baled,
and shipped back to Florence as common freight.
Undone, too, stood the Rondanini Pietà.
His finest, some say. Gouged from a Roman column,
the lonely, half-formed figures
cipher the incalculable distance between two fingers.
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