Fire Without Witness

Fire Without Witness is an epic poem that centers on the world of Michelangelo as revealed through his painting of The Sistine Ceiling. While painting the different panels, he reveals stories of his time, his life, and through his dreams, the future. As the panels are painted, the prophets and sibyls and objects of Creation come alive, unknown to Michelangelo, and tell their stories. The poem presents two skewed realities. And while at times the Biblical and Mythic voices see Michelangelo, they never reach his awareness. They barely interact, in brushing contacts we alone witness.

The poem follows, in sequence, the way Michelangelo actually painted the frescos on the Ceiling. The order of painting here is what I see as most logical. Other suggested sequences exist, due to the uneven progression of his work, but it is clear he painted the story of Creation in reverse order, moving from Noah to Adam to God creating the elements, winding his way back to the beginning. It took him three years to paint the Ceiling, not including the border of lunettes, and the poem is broken into three parts or movements, 1509, 1510, and 1511, each part into sections representing the panels painted during those years—25 sections in all.

It took me ten years to write the poem, which seems now a painting itself. It seems a vision of that rim between the human and the infinite, where our body of sense almost leaves us, than settles and hardens into what we are. And when dealing with the infinite, all comes down to one encompassing, unnamable source, one fire without witness. As Michelangelo himself put it, “What is in the very center is always free.”