after Mantegna

I
The trumpeters have gone ahead.
Morning of high, quick clouds -
He learned to paint on broken statues.
In his pictures, the weather looks real, the people
dressed in stone - bright, wind-caught stone - and stayed
in the gesture of a statue, the iconography of feeling
waiting in the flesh like animation stills.
Slow work of years, unfinished - work made
for the passageway of a Palace, where you keep stepping back
and back to see the thing entire - He has copied,
with the brushstrokes of a miniaturist, facts that are lost:
trophies and armour from a stone frieze
where now the market is, as if he could by that precision
free these spoils of the Triumph - That soldier
bearing the empty armour high on a cross -
armour enchased in dragon scales, its metal body strangely
eaten out, like apple casings at the end of summer
in the grass - that soldier missteps and looks down.
It is the gesture of remembering. The Triumph folds,
perspective by perspective, into that vanishing point -

II
The trumpeters have gone ahead.
The picture is mostly of legs -
it shows the Triumph from a child's viewpoint.
Soldiers and horses - so many, they crowd
perspective out. Only a few figures stand entire
at the boundary of the picture as if they would step
the next instant into that vast which is not there -
The pattern their legs make repeats
the pattern of lances, angles drawn against the clouds
like a working out of every possibility. Captured arms,
bulls crowned for sacrifice, prisoners, victories and
loads of coin, spears and catapults, colossal statues, elephants:
sights that replace each other, new and again
new, the way I remember highways from the back seat
of my parents' car - fields stacked with light
which did not pass but poured through me - Procession
so massed and intricate, here and again on their painted placards
where boys on fine-boned horses drag siege equipment
to the walled city and the city is their backdrop
and its backdrop is the sky -

III
The trumpeters have gone ahead.
Even from their calves,
from the balls of their feet, breath strains upwards
to the trumpet's mouth. They have closed their lips
on metal. Now they cry with its voice, bright
uncompanionable cry - It is the picture's only sound.
Catcalls, the jitter of harness, these you imagine
poised in that next instant when the horse's hoof
will fall, the chariot advance -
Only metal has changed the colour of the light,
making it colder even where it shines
alike on gold and bronze and polished lead -
Even the clouds look brittler with the light
struck off bright, blind metal -
Casually the soldiers walk after the trumpet's cry.