Grace Alvino: THE FIRE THAT CONSUMES ALL BEFORE IT

Poetry by Grace Alvino
THE FIRE THAT CONSUMES ALL BEFORE IT

When it was time for Cy Twombly to paint Fifty Days at Iliam
he left Rome and went into Teverina, to a town called Bassano
which is in the country. There was a house there, and the women
opened it for him when he came. They moved the furniture into
the courtyard and beat a cane wrapped in cloth against the
ceiling, and threw water on the floor and swept the dirt down
the staircase and into the street. They carried the art he wanted
into the house: the great books to be laid out on the beds and
the sketches, and the canvasses to be stacked in a second-
floor room. Later, he and a friend would cut them into panels
and nail them to the plaster. They would bring strips of fabric
down to the kitchen for the women to take out. There was to
be space on the floor for his frames and his Rembrandt paints
and his wax sticks, and from where he stood at the window he
saw the Tiber spread out against its banks. He watched it turn
red and below him, the women shared almonds between
themselves in the courtyard.

What they had done was prepare the house. They had readied
it for the making of the work: for the two years it would take him
to mark the rage of Achilles. Cassandra in her tower. Hector
and Patroclus in the field. The shapes called Priam. Troilus.
Agamemnon. The triangles in red and black as the sign for
A. The ten oil and graphite panels: beginning not with Achilles,
but with the river and the window. The Maria Callas records.
The unopened box of wax sticks on the floor. The gesture of
leaving—the going out—and the months of waiting for
attunement. Of preparing yourself: not to receive it, but to
gather it together. To bring the pieces before the canvas
and to make it into something that was—not legible, but that

you could stand in front of. That faced you in the whiteness
of the room. That took what you felt and gave it back to you
and told you, I have seen it. That said you were not the only
one who’d known it. Not the memory, but the feeling.

Grace Alvino’s poems have been featured in Four Way Review, Barrelhouse, ONE ART, MudRoom, and more. She earned her PhD in English from the University of Virginia, and she lives in Philadelphia with her husband and their dog and two cats. You can read more of her work at https://gracealvino.com.