Leonardo’s Park, Chateau Clos Lucé, Amboise by Roger Vickery
She positions me at the business end of a multi-barrel flesh-mulching scattergun you dreamed up for the Medici mob –you did your share of dirty work— and shoots me absently with her purple quilted iPad.
The cover’s texture mimics the padded hose Francis the First displays in your portrait that billows on silk outside the doors of your park.
Francis had good legs. Did you watch his curves the way I watch hers? Did you ache to part this late Loire light, kiss his distant lips with a young man’s kiss and ride like a centaur astride those limbs?
I’m the same age you were −‘that will you still love me’ thin ice age− when you crossed the Alps and clattered across the cobblestones of Clos Lucé with your holy trio: Virgin and Child with St Anne, a half-finished John the Baptist and your best girl Mona Lisa, crated in your saddlebags. Three years later you were dead.
You drew the crop circles of Vitruvian Man, exposed the wonder of his bones, sinews, sloshing blood. How could you have failed to consider the toll of that last journey? Five thousand leagues by bony mule, Sciatic nerves pinging like harp stings, Liver-stabbing food, old man piss stops beside ravines while Melzi your acolyte apprentice paces.
And how could a man with your imagination have omitted the cost of deracination? Your last paintings are cloud-capped Caliban dreams. Peaks and glaciers float like lost parachutes. Melzi said those canvases of your Lombard hills were stained with longing.
I suppose Francis the First was Maslow the First. We value you O Magister. We will name you: Chief Painter, Architect and Engineer of France. How could a bastard boy from Vinci resist?
Most of my life I have been chasing another Renaissance. Pissing good years into ravines. fabricating scatter guns. neglecting children… because some tin pot 21st century Francis draped his arms across shoulders and purred: You’re a genius. Love your work.
Like lead paint leeching though worn skin that type of betrayal kills slowly.
She has warned me I cannot make amends with a late- afternoon grand tour. There will be no Medici antidote for us.
We walk into a twilight glade where translucent close-ups from your saddlebag treasures lift towards heaven like linen flying machines.
As she gasps at your wonder of… bones… sinews… sloshing blood, I risk a brush stroke across her open hand.
Along with many awards for poetry, fiction, scripts and non-fiction. Roger Vickery has won the ACU Prize, one of Australia’s richest and most prestigious poetry awards. Roger’s poem, ‘Our Greater Souls’, which responded to the theme of Belonging, is centred on his family’s deep but tenuous connection with dispossessed indigenous land. His work has been published/ performed in Australia, the UK, the USA and Ireland.
Photo courtesy of Roger Vickery
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