Searching For Michelangelo

I told him we were broken, the way horses can be, and he galloped through the sentence like a cowboy, less a heart. I loosed the biggest word I could think of – so enormous I felt everything in me squeeze back as it passed by and nearly choked as it pushed its way into the outer world - and he brushed it aside like errant dandelion snow. By then, there were at least four voices within me, ranting, and the image of myself throwing buckets of paint against a wall was blinking repeatedly in my head. And still he was talking – with his hands gesturing, gesturing - talking about places he’d been talking about what he thinks himself passionate about talking about what he learned in counseling and talking talking, talking about nothing. When he got to Italy, I stopped him at Michelangelo, thinking, “here! – here finally is a scaffold we can throw ourselves off of”. Thinking if Einstein’s wardrobe wasn’t enough, if a scrawny white boy singing the blues wasn’t either and if the most interesting thing I said that night was that I never ever set a clock to an uneven time (and I hadn’t even said that yet)… maybe the image of an artist suspended in air with his heart pointed to heaven and the myriad of thoughts that must have run like a river through him as he stood there, arm outstretched, might trigger something. But, he had no idea that Buonarroti was a poet or that he honestly expected Moses to speak to him once freed from the confines of stone and of artist himself, he said nothing. Apparently, he was more Moses than Michelangelo, and it was all I could do not to take a hammer to his knee.