St Jerome Reading in an Italian Landscape

When you read on a summer’s day
with your head in the shade of a tree
and your finger placed in an earlier chapter
perhaps checking the notes
or going back to the pictures to perform that trick
like googling the youthful photos of actors
just to devastate yourself
with their beauty.

When you read leaning on one elbow
(a finite posture) reclining on a bank
while around you, cross-hatched lines
of shade make up a world of depth
of leaves and branches, even a dove
its head turned to the side, caught
in a state of classically avian inane alertness. 

And there they are! The slippers of St Jerome
like those white towelling freebies from a hotel.
He has slid them off to hide his feet from the sun
beneath the hem of his cascading robe.
His face under a feminine hat.

Nothing can be an accident when it is Rembrandt.
A church and a ramshackle farmhouse, high on the hill
a cavernous shadow below,
a bridge with one figure, and next to it a head
the body obscured: all must have a story to tell.
And this tree that looks like a dragon
and this smudge-mark of a branch
and this rock, which could also be a collie dog
watching from the very corner of the page.

And then, what I haven’t mentioned, the lion.
Seen from behind, its muscled haunches
its tail within inches of the reading Saint
the dark landscape of its mane, site of its power
a glimpse of face, turned away, surprisingly cat-like
with its two or three sweet whiskers.  

And now I decode the mystery of Saint Jerome:

Hermit, Priest, and Doctor of the Church

In the whiteness of his robe he signifies running out of time.
In his hat, with its beehive shape, he reminds us of bees
which are quite literally worrying themselves to death.

In the presence of the collie dog, imaginary as it may be,
we see the hope of dogs which rise from the ocean bearing sticks
and this is why it faces an outcrop that resembles the head of a sperm whale:
that all mammals may be known as somehow out of their element.

The figures on the bridge: that every person needs at least two heads.
The church and the cottage: that you must eat as well as sing.
The dark and the smudgy woods: that from time to time comets
will take their trails across everything you thought was just getting organised.

And the lion: that we might wish for a god as golden-black
with clubby feet and sweet, careful eyes
that when we read, with our slippers kicked off
and our hands barely sketched in a few careless lines
that he would keep watch for us
though what would stop him turning from his post
and taking Jerome in his mouth like a joint of meat
may need to be the subject of further research.

Kate Camp

Kate Camp is the author of five collections of poems, all from Victoria University Press. The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls won the New Zealand Book Award for poetry in 2011, and Snow White's Coffin, written while Camp held the Creative New Zealand Berlin writers residency, was shortlisted for the award in 2013.