“At Luca Signorelli’s Resurrection of the Body”

“At Luca Signorelli’s Resurrection of the Body” — Jorie Graham

Pulled from "Erosion" by Jorie Graham.

A poem I quite enjoyed!

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See how they hurry

to enter

their bodies,

these spirits.

Is it better, flesh,

that they

should hurry so?

From above

the green-winged angels

blare down

trumpets and light. But

they don’t care,

they hurry to congregate,

they hurry

into speech, until

it’s a marketplace,

it is humanity. But still

we wonder

in the chancel

of the dark cathedral,

is it better, back?

The artist

has tried to make it so: each tendon

they press

to re-enter

is perfect. But is it

perfection

they’re after,

pulling themselves up

through the soil

into the weightedness, the color,

into the eye

of the painter? Outside

it is 1500,

all round the cathedral

streets hurry to open

through the wild

silver grasses…

The men and women

on the cathedral wall

do not know how,

having come this far,

to stop their

hurrying. They amble off

in groups, in

couples. Soon

some are clothed, there is

distance, there is

perspective. Standing below them

in the church

in Orvieto, how can we

tell them

to be stern and brazen

and slow,

that there is no

entrance,

only entering. They keep on

arriving,

wanting names,

wanting

happiness. In his studio

Luca Signorelli

in the name of God

and Science

and the believable

broke into the body

studying arrival.

But the wall

of the flesh

opens endlessly,

its vanishing point so deep

and receding

we have yet to find it,

to have it

stop us. So he cut

deeper,

graduating slowly

from the symbolic

to the beautiful. How far

is true?

When one son

died violently,

he had the body brought to him

and laid it

on the drawing-table,

and stood

at a certain distance

awaiting the best

possible light, the best depth

of day,

then with beauty and care

and technique

and judgment, cut into

shadow, cut

into bone and sinew and every

pocket

in which the cold light

pooled.

It took him days,

that deep

caress, cutting,

unfastening,

until his mind

could climb into

the open flesh and

mend itself. 

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Graham was inspired by the Renaissance painter Luca Signorelli, particularly his frescoes in the cathedral of Orvieto, which depict the Resurrection of the Dead. This poem is a mediation on the religious relationship between spirit and flesh, art and reality, life and death, and the incessant human pursuit of the spiritual and physical convolution. 

"Is it better, flesh, / that they / should hurry so?" A sense of desperation and eagerness fuels their actions and examines the question: is corporeal life truly superior to a spiritual state? The spirits are indifferent to the heavenly calls of the trumpets and light, focusing on the imminent re-embodiment of the earth. The depiction of their hurried congregation into speech and social interaction changes the scene into an embodiment of chaos and vibrancy. The spirits, now embodied, exhibit a restlessness emblematic of human nature's insatiable drive for progress and experience. The observer's perspective from the church in Orvieto introduces a desire for the spirits to embrace life's complexity with deliberation and courage. The poem suggests that life is an ongoing process of "entering" rather than reaching a fixed "entrance," with the spirits perpetually arriving in search of names and recognition. The artist Luca Signorelli's exploration of the human form, both scientifically and artistically, mirrors this quest. His deep study of the body symbolizes humanity's broader search for understanding, where beauty and truth are intertwined.