Months after the sculpture’s completion
(where the bronze flesh of the boy leaned
actively into the dismembered
head of a giant,
one toe burrowed into the beard,
working to clarify the triumph of innocence)
Donatello dreamed of the young king’s feet:
each one
moving over his body,
his stomach,
his genitals,
maneuvering the skin
of the legs
until they disappeared.
The sculptor woke
still sensing each
indentation,
overcome by a need for disembodiment,
that urge one gets against the self
when observing the forms
of other life,
but it was a form he created that encouraged him
to crawl out of bed and chisel at his own flesh,
a part separate from the whole
that led him to believe the moment of creation
had turned against him
and that the rock which sprung from the hands
of that smiling child was not meant to reach
the Philistine, but the balding head
of the artist himself.
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