I’d start with Caravaggio, his St. Jerome
draped in crimson robes. No lion there,
just a table, two books open, one closed,

flanked by skulls, one just bone, like Yorick’s,
remembers death, and Jerome’s own head,
bowed as it is, near the text, pen in hand,

arm outstretched to the inkwell or to death,
who says: Let the words be yours; I am done
with mine. The robe entwined with Jerome

also sweeps behind the books. A concavity
below his sternum alludes to his austerity—
the fasts, the caves—his stifling of his desires

in the name of God. “Good, better, best.
Never rest.” or so he said. “Till your good
is better and your better is the best.”

The wrinkles and the sinews in his arm
indicate his age: he’s left the desert and returned
to Rome, to achieve his fate, to translate scripture,

Hebrew into Latin, sense for sense. Painting for
a cardinal, his subject a millennium now dead,
Caravaggio resides in Rome a few years more,

swaggering with his sword, lead-poisoned,
looking for a fight, throwing scalding carciofi
at a waiter’s slight, for suggesting he could tell

the buttered artichokes from oiled by smell.
The flash of a sword, globes strewn all over
the floor. He drank all night. And by day,

made a poetry of light. How could he see Jerome
so well: bent over the page, reading the remains,
or so he thought, of the words of God.

A glimmer of a halo delineates the space
above his head. A hand to the inkwell is a hand
to the skull, for a little-whiler like ourselves,

but on the other hand, the translator defies
time, reading and rewriting line by line,
investing words with afterlives. Sure, the body

weathers, or thins like paper, skin leathers,
and hair can disappear or cloud like Jerome’s beard,
in the painter’s hands, or like the silver halo

of another St. Jerome, defying time inside
another well-known skull, surrounded by
memento mori of the Grateful Dead.

I remember them, as I saw and heard, high
up, between a row of chairs in Oakland, 1989,
and glimpsed a thought unclothed by words

and realized I had no need for a mooring
to my name or to a place. Jerome, Heironomos,
sacred name: you had no need to starve

yourself or self-flagellate. And Caravaggio
did not need trouble, though it taught him
the language of pain. Jerry, with his guitar,

LSD, and later on, cocaine, revised the old
addage against rest: “You don’t just want to be
considered the best of the best. You want

to be the only one who does what you do.”
And this is true of both Jeromes, certainly,
or put another way by Jerry G.: “whistle

through your teeth and spit, it’s alright.”
Although Jerome was terrified, in 369,
by the church’s answer to the question,

“How should a person be?” Caravaggio
painted him so lovingly, in payment for
his crimes. Perhaps the aesthetic can be

causal, but what about today? A long,
laconic guitar solo, with brushes
on the drums, translates invisible shapes

in fits and starts, as I approach the midlife
wood with long-gone guides, revenant hearts
survived by art or music or by growing

a garden green, marks made in striving
to be good—a vibrating scrawl of melody—
or to free, in light and shadow, struggling.