The first of my umbrages is how utterly
humdrum eternity seems.
There is, of course, the pomp of angels

one might expect
in a papal commission. In the center
space of golden aureoles

and just above an alabaster Christ (who
looks more than a bit like
Raphael himself) displaying his nail-punched

palms, reigns this very old,
unenthused Father-God figure as if crowned
with a nimbused mortar board,

holding his globe in one hand while gesturing
blessings with the other.
On the right side of the Jesus image sits Mary

in devotion—apparently the only
woman worthy of note. Who can dissent from
Moses, both Johns, the Baptist

and Revelator, martyred Peter and Paul
being in paradise?
But Adam being there, after that bedlam

of damnation which he and Eve
unleashed, is I suppose, where we have to allow
for grace. Next, there’s the eerie cloud

of rosy-faced putti like chubby beasts
of burden suspending
all the elect—not much enticement to give up

a life of carousing and covetousness.
Were I given to iconography, rather than my reds
and blues being used for

Renaissance robes, they’d be saved
for the plumes of marvelous,
praising birds that fluttered near waterfalls,

where beautiful horses
graze and gallop through summer days, and where
resurrection would abound

in instantaneous geraniums, with golds scumbled
over backlit rainbows.
Anyway, below Raphael’s vision of the sublime,

a more animated, temporal fray
about transubstantiation takes place among mostly
the usual suspects, such as Augustine,

Ambrose, and various popes, as well as Savonarola
and stony Dante—presumably,
all of them to be tempered by Aristotle’s inclusion.

One redeeming thing
is the ghost-white dove with wings spread
in flight beneath Jesus’s feet

and who appears to be headed for Earth, swiftly
toward their monstrance
to help settle this magnificent trivia being waged.

Raphael, Disputation of the Sacrament , fresco, 1509–1510. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.