Occitania

In the papal palace in Avignon
I muse on all the sorcery practised here
Among whores, charlatans, libertines and speculators,
The intrigue and debauchery,
The masterful corruption:Pope John XXII, from Cahors,
Owed his election to a magic knife
That enchanted the conclave of cardinals;
Through alchemical expertise
He filled the treasury with gold,
And used magic to protect himself
Against his many enemies,
Forestalling the hands of assassins
As they mixed for him ashes of spiders and toads
Or manufactured diabolical homunculi.

In the Musée Renoir in Cagnes-sur-Mer,
I stand, caught,
Where the artist toiled his last years’ dark web,
Agonized by rheumatoid arthritis,
Yet roiling on, fighting to enforce
His visions, to the end,the very end;
He painted with brushes strapped to those bent crippled hands,
Thrashing out paintings more voluptuous than ever;
Here stands his empty wheelchair,
His empty easel,
And the light of the olive grove.

The Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence,
Every detail designed by Matisse:
An old man using long bamboo poles
To hold his brushes as he hunched in a wheelchair;
The culmination of a life
Consecrated to the search,
The religion of line and light.
On the west wall blooms The Tree of Life,
All blue, green and yellow leaves glowing,
Which the sun slants through
And replicates across the stone altar.

In the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence,
Fifteen embalmed Celtic heads sit in array,
And the sculptures of heads, made to replace
Real trophies that had mouldered away;
These ancestors the Celts would sleep with at night,
Beseeching oracular counsel.
In the church of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine,
Midway the Triptych of the Annunciation,
The angel Gabriel, winged with owl feathers
As a bird of ill omen, kneels in the porch
Of a Gothic church, decorated with bat and dragon,
While from on high God transmits in a golden breath-stream
A cruciferous foetus, just missing a monkey’s head;
And a slender vase sports noxious belladonna.

In the Vallée des Merveilles,
Beneath Mont Bégo,
I wander, scrying scratched symbols:
Human figures, bulls and serpents,
Circles, spirals, ladders, and chequerboard patterns,
For eight hundred years
People came here and carved on the rocks.

The seven-sided church of Rieux-Minervois,
Virgin star,
Bethel of Sophia:
The central heptagon around the altar-
Four pilasters and three columns-,
Celebrates the marriage
Of foursquare world
And triangular heaven.
Midsummer sunrise fires its line
Through the altar’s prism
And out through a window,
Linking chapels across country.
She to whom the Sufis and troubadours
Sang their devotion
Is here, here still,
Weighing all suits,
To bestow or deny.