Beheading Bacchus

Painting by Michangelo Merisi de Caravaggio.

Beheading Bacchus


Chad Davidson


The shoulders, having been lowered in fields,
glisten rouge. Around his head the usual halo
of vines, a fistful of young leaves translucent
as skin, the white of knuckles, a sword curled
with arabesques of the same young leaves. Study
the facial muscles as they suggest more than three
hundred heavens, one for every minute
the sun lords over a rain-stained morning.
You’ve never held the weight of the harvest
knife, strangely heavy, its handle worn,
or felt the deft twist unhinging fruit as a few
young leaves hurry to become the land you walk.
No matter how you try, the painting will not
leave, the one in a Dallas museum after wisps
of Giacometti and an anchor thrown in the courtyard
café where grapes held sculptured poses
table-centered, ice clinked in highballs,
and Bacchus, a peasant in the pheasant riches
of late autumn, grape-stained and cumbersome
in a tableau of tunicked lutists. Again, he lowers
his shoulders, caught in the glare of a jewel
of juice. If he could speak, who’s to say
he wouldn’t beg? Overripe, in the anti-state
of forgetfulness, he descends to the tendrils
of your engraving, and the sun gleams off the blade
you raise in late autumn, the three-hundredth
heaven heaved out of the terrible soil, a breath
of wind, buttery and difficult, stirring his head of curls.

Published in Issue #15 of Smartish Pace