- Giancarlo steadies himself with one hand
- against the fabled ceiling
- as with the other he gently wipes away
- the veil of centuries,
- incense and wax, sneezes and coughs,
- all that has turned
- the Master's exuberant palette into elegant gloom.
- They have been here for months, reversing time,
- while the world debates the dangers, the proprieties.
- Are they destroying the irreplaceable?
- Making mundane the ineffable?
- Could the Master really have been so brash?
- Giancarlo smiles as his careful cloth reveals
- a swath of purple so vivid it stings his eyes.
- Bravo, Maestro. Bellissimo. Ben' fatto.
- He moves himself along to mark the next small quadrant
- he will assay, bracing himself against a browned leg.
- With a gasp and the speed of a burn,
- he pulls the steadying hand to his face
- looking at it in confusion.
- Slowly, he moves it back to where
- it fits perfectly into the imprint of an earlier hand
- pressed into the plaster when it was soft and white
- awaiting the exact colors of sunlit flesh.
- He stood here, just where Giancarlo stands
- his hands raised as are Giancarlo's
- his right laying in his figures, quickly,
- before the matrix sets, his left testing the surface
- where he will manifest a muscled thigh
- when the stucco's texture is not too soft, not too dry.
- Giancarlo shouts to the others and one by one
- they mount the scaffold and place fingers, thumb, palm
- into the revelation, here all these hundreds of years,
- unseen by the generations looking up in awe.
- Each touches, pulls back, and touches again,
- feeling life charge from the Master's hand to his.
- Joyful communion, gift of grace, a blessing and a wink.
- Grazie, Maestro. Grazie, per tutto.
